


Resonance

by boxparade



Series: Synergy [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dai-nana-han | Team 7 (Naruto)-centric, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Post-Chapter 698, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2018-11-19 14:03:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11314920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: Sasuke is of the opinion that this—the fucking—is little more than a hormone-fueled temporary stress relief arrangement. It will wear off, their feelings will fade with time and maturity, and they will move on, so there’s no reason to do anything to cement their relationship in the meantime. He has attempted a total of four times to painstakingly explain this to his bedmates.It hadn’t stuck.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> IT'S HERE. Oh my god it's finally here.
> 
> If you guys knew how long I delayed this just trying to find a title you would hate me forever.
> 
> But whatever. It's done, it's titled, and now I can devote my time entirely to the third and final(?) installment in this series, which is by far my favorite. And currently clocks in at around 65,000 words, at only 2/3 done, so don't hold your breath. I will finish the third eventually, but until then at least the sequel is done, eh?
> 
> Some notes about this fic:
> 
> This was tough for me. I've always been more inclined toward plotty fics, and this is...not that. This is a lot of sex. And relationship stuff. Which is not my forte.
> 
> But the idea that relationships are perfect from right out the gate bothers me to no end, and I felt I had to do this justice in that regard. I also really wanted to explore the dynamics of the pairings within the trio.
> 
> I have my misgivings, but I'm not going to state them here lest I risk ruining it for you. Feel free to bring your critiques to the comments and I will happily get into it in detail. (:
> 
> Anyway. Happy reading, and please please please offer concrit if you have it so I can improve my craft.
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Sasuke is of the opinion that this—the fucking—is little more than a hormone-fueled temporary stress relief arrangement. It will wear off, their feelings will fade with time and maturity, and they will move on, so there’s no reason to do anything to cement their relationship in the meantime. He has attempted a total of four times to painstakingly explain this to his bedmates: first the both of them at once, then Sakura alone, then Naruto alone, then the both of them again.

It hadn’t stuck.

Their lack of ability to understand their situation does not mitigate its truthfulness, however, so Sasuke resigns himself to putting up with their domestic fantasies until the hormones stabilize and they naturally dissolve their tryst and move on. It is a matter of time.

This contributes to his reason for wanting to take solo missions. Sakura has her work at the hospital, and Naruto has been inundated with paperwork as part of his grooming for Seventh, so Sasuke requires something to do that is entirely separate from Team 7, because if he spends any more time with them than he currently does, he might actually murder Naruto.

He doesn’t have a lot of options, truth be told.

He’s _capable_ of doing anything—from slaughtering Konoha to slaughtering its enemies—but what he’s _allowed_ to do is severely limited. He may be a council member, and a clan leader, but he’s still a traitor and, if he’s choosing to operate within the scope of Konoha, he’s still subject to the council’s restrictions.

He’s a ‘probationary shinobi’, which is one step above ‘prisoner of war’ and means that the sole reason he’s not chakra-bound in a cell somewhere is because the golden boy vouched for him. That doesn’t mean the council wants him setting foot outside Konoha. If they can’t neutralize him beyond a shadow of a doubt or kill him, then they’re going to keep him here.

He could aid in the construction effort, if anyone would agree to work with him. Doubtful, with how they tend to spit at him or grab their children and scurry away. Besides, his skills are skewed heavily toward fighting and destruction.

A large majority of the shinobi assignments involve leaving the village, which the council would never allow. He’s certainly not taking D-rank missions within the village. If he ever lays eyes on Tora again, he’d probably slit her throat just to end her suffering.

Still, there are higher-ranked assignments that function almost entirely within the village. Border patrol, if anyone would trust him not to let the assassins in through the front gates.

And the Hokage’s personal guard.

Sasuke groans. Kakashi is ridiculously inept at being Hokage. He certainly doesn’t need a 24/7 personal guard paid to watch him read porn and tease Naruto all day. Sasuke certainly doesn’t want to do anything of the sort, but if he doesn’t do something, he’ll snap, kill some people, and cement his place in an underground cell for the rest of his life.

He has no other options.

Asking to join ANBU will not go over well with the council. Whatever misguided opinion Naruto may hold of him, the golden boy has no say in ANBU matters, at least not until he takes the hat. Kakashi does. He can overrule the council if need be.

He would go to Kakashi with his head bowed in humble apology, if he thought for a moment Kakashi would buy it. Despite evidence to the contrary, Kakashi is no fool. Perhaps, though, that could work in his favor.

Only one way to find out.

He doesn’t bother making an official appointment—he wouldn’t be allowed in, anyway. Instead, he follows Kakashi and waits for an opening. It doesn’t take long. Mostly because Kakashi makes his way to a secluded training ground in the middle of his lunch hour and says “Maa, Sasuke, I’ve never known you to be scared of approaching me.”

“Tch.” Sasuke jumps out from the coverage of the trees, landing in front of Kakashi.

In an instant, four ANBU appear around them, hands twitching toward their weapons. Sasuke raises his eyebrows.

Kakashi sighs. “Now, now. I’d like to have a private conversation with my student.”

The ANBU hesitate, but Kakashi slumps against a tree trunk, hands in his pockets, and Sasuke purposefully relaxes his stance. The ANBU flash away, though Sasuke is under no illusion that they’re going to grant Kakashi’s request for a ‘private’ conversation.

“What can I help you with, Sasuke-kun?”

“I’ve come to request your permission to join ANBU.”

Kakashi hums noncommittally.

He had hoped he wouldn’t need to elaborate, but he should’ve expected as much.

“My skills are being wasted. I’m not a house-husband.” Damn it, he hadn’t meant to say that.

Kakashi grins behind his mask. “I’d heard my three little students had moved in together. Anything you’d like to tell me?”

“No.”

“Looking to get away from them so soon?”

He curls his hands into fists in his pockets. “The war on the Southern continent has become a larger concern for Konoha. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be utilized, in whatever capacity I’m able.”

“Are you _bored?”_ Kakashi sounds positively gleeful. Sasuke grinds his teeth together and doesn’t respond. “Why ANBU?”

“What other option is there?” he counters. “The council refuses to let me operate as a true shinobi. I’m constrained to the village for the time being. I’m not cut out for civilian work. As Hokage, you have unbridled control over ANBU. The council will respect your decision.”

Kakashi hums thoughtfully. Sasuke briefly wonders what the ANBU listening in think of this, but it won’t matter. They’re trained to listen to the Hokage unquestioningly. If he asks them to work alongside a traitor, they’ll do so without comment.

“Is this truly what you want, Sasuke?”

_No,_ he thinks. But it’s a far cry better than any other conceivable path, and he thinks he can sway Kakashi into assigning him missions outside the village. Once he’s a member of ANBU, he’ll have a certain degree of anonymity. The council wouldn’t be any the wiser if Kakashi decided to send him out of the village on a mission. It may even improve his reputation, if he were to successfully complete missions and return to Konoha without a trail of enemy-nin.

“Yes,” he says instead.

He can’t be sure, but he thinks Kakashi is pleased with his answer.

“Then welcome to ANBU.”

There’s a distinct rustling sound from the tree line. Sasuke smiles.

 

* * *

 

“Ehhh? That’s great, Sasuke! Oh man, you’re gonna make a totally badass ANBU member! And they do really, really important stuff for the village! Hey, do you know what animal mask they’re gonna give you? Shit, am I allowed to ask that? Okay but _theoretically_ what animal do you think you’re gonna get?”

Sakura and Naruto are both happy for him, although Naruto might better be described as ‘ecstatic’. They seem to be of the impression that he is doing this out of some sort of newly kindled loyalty to Konoha, and he’s content to let them think that. (Sasuke has never been and will never be loyal to Konoha, but he is loyal to Naruto and Sakura, who are in turn loyal to Konoha.)

Sasuke begins taking missions with ANBU—including missions outside the village after what can only be described as a ‘trial period’ during which Kakashi was completely insufferable—and he fully believes he has accounted for every possibility.

He believes this up until he returns from a mission that lasted upwards of three weeks and finds his teammates in uncharacteristically foul moods upon his return.

“Break it again and the next time you come in here, I’ll give you a matching set,” Sakura snaps, throwing the terrified genin’s chart down with a clatter and stomping from the room. Sasuke stays entirely silent, leaning back against the opposite wall with his arms crossed and his eyebrows raised.

Her anger briefly dissipates when she sees him, but she continues walking at a brisk pace and says firmly, “Welcome back. My shift is finished and I’m leaving. Come.”

Sasuke pushes himself from the wall and follows her out of the hospital, noting the way everyone seems to scatter the moment they see her approaching. He feels something unfamiliar—and wholly unwelcome—at the sight. (Later, he will concede that it feels startlingly similar to pride.)

The sun has just set, and Sakura makes surprisingly quick work of finding their other teammate. Sasuke was planning on tracking him down regardless, but it seems significantly easier to simply follow Sakura while she sets off on her single-minded rampage, clearing a path in her wake.

They find Naruto, slumped on his arm over a table, in the middle of some sort of strategy meeting with the intelligence department. He looks remarkably more bored than Sasuke thought him capable of putting up with, but it would seem his determination to become Hokage is stronger than his tendency to demand action and adventure.

Shikamaru is seated next to him, looking disinterested but ultimately alert. There are maps and markers littering the table, and seven others seated at the conference table.

Sasuke leans back with a smirk on his face and watches as Sakura marches right into the meeting room, asks “Is Naruto finished for the day?” and then completely disregards the cries about private meetings and important strategic secrets and Shikamaru’s vaguely disinterested mumble of “troublesome” as she grabs Naruto around the arm and physically drags him from the room.

“What the hell, Sakura-chan!” Naruto shouts, trying to struggle free from her grip on his arm. “That was important!”

“Oh, yes,” Sakura hisses, her expression vicious and stormy, “I could tell by the way you were drooling onto your sleeve.”

Naruto fumbles for a response, but then finally manages to wretch his arm free and snaps “It doesn’t matter if it’s boring, I’ve gotta attend all those stupid meetings if they’re gonna make me Hokage. Just ‘cause _you_ spend all day giving genins lollipops—”

_“What_ did you just say?” Sakura shouts, and her steps begin to leave cracks in the tiling.

Sasuke slinks along behind them, mostly unnoticed, managing to affect a disinterested expression as they shoot insults at each other and stomp their way through town, back to their house. (As part of his aforementioned resignation to illusions of domesticity, he agreed to move in with Naruto and Sakura, in a small but nice house on the edge of the central part of the village.)

They make it two steps inside the front door when their bickering cuts off with furious, biting kisses at each other’s mouths, and Sasuke manages three seconds of the show before Sakura grabs him by the front of his shirt and drags him into it.

 

* * *

 

It’s sometime when the orgasm count is Sasuke: 1, Naruto: 2, and Sakura: 3 going on 4, that Sasuke realizes the reason he returned to find his teammates in such a state is possibly because they were horny.

Sasuke honestly has to work to overcome his desire to laugh.

Half an hour later, Sakura is stretched out on her stomach and quietly sleeping, and Naruto is sprawled haphazardly over both of them on the bed, stark naked and snuffling steadily. Sasuke is lying awake, hands laced behind his head in a gesture that he knows is a consequence of hanging around Naruto so often (and subsequently one he refuses to let Naruto catch him at.)

He had been away on a mission for just over three weeks. This was not particularly unusual for ANBU missions, or even for missions in general, given travel times to some of their target locations now that most of those fall outside the bounds of the Union.

Sasuke, at least, could admit that he was twisted enough not to need release when on mission, because most missions came with enough bloodshed and fighting that he felt entirely satisfied regardless of the technicalities. Sakura and Naruto, as he discovered, were not similarly satiated.

Also relevant to this line of thinking: the implicit, somewhat unspoken agreement that they not have sex unless all three of them were present and participating. This is yet another element of their arrangement that Sasuke finds pointless.

Sasuke doesn’t give a damn if Naruto and Sakura want to fuck like bunnies while he’s away. He’s never understood the reasoning behind this implied rule in the first place. The only reason Sasuke doesn’t screw anyone he pleases is because one, there’s no one besides the two dimwits who remotely interests him, and two, they both have delusions of this being a ‘lasting relationship’, and Sasuke doubts he’d have much luck explaining that his (relatively new, but thus far unwavering) loyalty to the both of them has very little to do with the sex they’re having.

None of this precludes Naruto and Sakura relieving pent-up sexual energy with each other when he’s away on mission.

He does consider saying nothing. If anything, the sex upon his return was particularly spirited and more violent—which he prefers. He would imagine Naruto and Sakura would be easier to influence when they’re desperate, but the problem then arises that he wouldn’t know what to influence them toward. With his current goals in mind, having them malleable doesn’t necessarily trump keeping them happy and sated. Not because he overly cares about their emotional health and wellbeing, but because he cares that they accomplish their goals. The happier and healthier they are, the more likely they are to succeed. And the more likely Sasuke is to have personal ties to the future Seventh Hokage and the future Head of Medicine.

In other words: clout.

He tried doing things with brute force and power before, and he wound up half-dead with a missing limb, his team scattered, his brother dead and innocent, and the world in such pathetic shape that he wouldn’t want to rule it even if he’d been able to. This time, he intends to see what a team and a village and friendship can do for him. At the very least, it seemed to do a lot for Naruto.

All of these factors add up to the conclusion that the most beneficial course of action for him at this juncture is to get Naruto and Sakura to fuck.

Considering their history, this will be astoundingly easy.


	2. Chapter 2

Naruto narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Uhhhh... Are you breaking up with us?”

Sasuke looks kinda like he swallowed a lemon and he’s trying not to let anyone _know_ that he swallowed a lemon. Or maybe he’s just constipated. Naruto thinks he’s getting better at reading Sasuke’s expressions, but ever since they started dating it’s like there have been a whole lot more of them, and it’s not like his expressions are all that different from each other to begin with.

“No, you idiot. I’m saying there’s no reason you two can’t do whatever you’d like while I’m away on a mission.”

“But, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura chimes in. Her voice is light and deferent, but Naruto knows by now it’s mostly a ruse. She’ll beat them up if they don’t do what she wants, because she’s scary and _really good_ at lying. “Wouldn’t that be unfair to you?”

Naruto nods along, mostly because he doesn’t wanna get hit. He’s still not sure he follows the whole line of thinking, here, but he’s sure Sakura will explain it to him when it’s over. Probably, anyway.

Sasuke looks annoyed now. Naruto can tell ‘cause his eyebrow is twitching, like it used to do before he went through his whole weird, emotionless-robot phase.

“Look, it benefits me if—” Sasuke pauses, like he’s thinking about something too hard, and then his whole voice changes when he starts talking again. “It’s become apparent that it would make both of _you_ happier if you could...relieve some stress...while I’m out of the village.”

Sakura is blushing and getting all dewy-eyed. Naruto is still really suspicious. He crosses his arms and cocks his head to the side.

“You could...” Sasuke looks down and to the side, his fingers gripping the edge of the kitchen table. “Even tell me about it, when I return.” He looks up. “In detail.”

Sakura squeaks and her face matches the color of her hair. Naruto scratches at his head and then blurts out “What good’s telling you about it gonna do when we could just do it with you instead?”

As Sakura’s palm slams into the back of his head, Naruto wonders exactly how he’s supposed to _survive_ this, if they even get to that part before Sakura flattens him. When Naruto recovers enough to stop yelling “ow” and looks up (while rubbing at the back of his throbbing head), Sakura has her arms wrapped around an uncomfortable-looking Sasuke.

It takes him a little bit, but Naruto is _pretty sure_ this means Sakura really, really wants to have sex with him.

Naruto grins.

“Hey, bastard, you’re pretty smart!”

“Tch,” Sasuke replies, looking up and to the side, and he refuses to acknowledge Naruto for the rest of the day. (Naruto totally doesn’t care, he’s too busy humming under his breath and thinking about all the really, really awesome sex he’s gonna get to have with Sakura the next time Sasuke goes on a mission.)

 

* * *

 

Naruto was apparently still a little confused about what it is they agreed to do, because Sasuke leaves for another mission with ANBU, and Naruto thinks this means: yay, sex with Sakura!

Only Sakura seems kind of...weird, and everything is really tense, and then she stammers out something about needing to go check on something important and then disappears into the hospital for two days.

Naruto spends the first day and a half moping. This mission is only supposed to last two weeks, but _anything_ could happen, and Naruto had it hard enough the last time after just the first week. He had to start jerking off twice a day just ‘cause everything felt so weird and heavy and kind of awful, and then he’d just started feeling pissed off all the time and Shikamaru told him to suck it up because he was making _him_ depressed.

But Naruto is not actually an idiot. Well, he is kind of, sometimes. But he’s become _less_ of an idiot since he was 12, and he’s definitely smart enough to start learning how to be Hokage, and hanging around Shikamaru so much has gotta mean something’s rubbing off on him.

So Naruto devises a plan. His plan really only has two steps, but he’s pretty sure it’s a really good plan and it’s gonna work:

Step 1: Woo Sakura.

Step 2: Sex.

It’s just the first step that he’s gotta figure out, and he’s gotta figure it out without trying to figure out why Sakura is being so weird in the first place, because Naruto knows not to try to figure out why girls act the way they do. If he tried figuring that out, he’d have to just wait until Sasuke got home again.

But Sakura is still hiding in the depths of the hospital, and the last time Naruto went in there to go bother her while she was working, he got punched two floors down. So instead, he finds Akane and asks if she knows when Sakura gets off her shift.

“I think she’s pulling a double again, so it’s probably around 11 pm?”

“Thanks, Akane-chan!” Naruto says happily, and takes off before Sakura can see him hovering around the hospital.

He would get her flowers or chocolates or something, but he’s pretty sure things are different when you’re already living with someone, and Sakura is a really badass medical ninja anyway, so she probably doesn’t go for all the normal girl stuff.

Still, Naruto wants to do something nice for her, and also something that isn’t gonna get him hurt, and _also_ something that isn’t gonna say, like, “have sex with me right now please”.

This is harder than he thought.

Still, it’s twelve days before Sasuke gets home. There’s no way Naruto is gonna last that long again. He screws up his face in concentration, shoves his hands into his pockets, and heads home.

At 11:05, Naruto is hovering nervously by the front door, chewing on his lip and fidgeting. There’s no way Sakura would sleep somewhere else just to avoid him, right? It’s not like they all share a bedroom all the time, anyway. Sakura has her own room and her own bathroom and neither of them are supposed to disturb her when she’s there, and Naruto _wouldn’t,_ but maybe she doesn’t trust him? What if Sakura doesn’t even _want_ to do anything with Naruto and she’s only doing this ‘cause it means she gets to sleep with Sasuke and she thinks Sasuke is the one who wants Naruto involved and—

The door opens.

“Welcome home, Sakura-chan,” he says warmly.

Sakura pauses as she’s taking off her boots, looking up at him suspiciously. “Hello,” she says slowly.

Naruto glances down, and his cheeks feel hot. “Um, I thought, since you’re home—”

Sakura freezes sharply and narrows her eyes. Naruto hurries to stumble through the rest of what he has to say.

“Since you’re home from a really long shift, and um, you’re probably really tired, right? So I—ah—” Naruto shifts between his feet, like he doesn’t know what to do, and then he looks at his empty hands, and then he darts into the kitchen where he left the tea because he’s stupid and he was supposed to have this all ready, but he pours Sakura a cup of tea and then carefully grabs the cup and brings it back out, offering it to her with outstretched arms and the barest wince on his face.

“I made tea! It’s decaf, and it’s the flowery one from the Yamanaka’s that you like, so.” He jostles the mug a little bit and snaps his mouth closed nervously.

Sakura blinks at him. Crap. Maybe she didn’t want tea? Maybe she thinks it’s weird to have it when Naruto isn’t having any, or it’s not morning, or it’s Ino’s Family’s tea, or—

“Thank you,” Sakura says, like she’s surprised, and then takes the mug from him with delicate hands and cradles it under her face.

Naruto is pretty sure _his_ face matches her hair. He keeps his eyes fixed on the ground, but he can’t help but smile just a little bit. “And—and I, um. Drew you a bath?” He says, wincing at how it sounds because it seemed like such a good idea, before, like of course she’s gonna want a bath, she _always_ takes a bath after she’s had a really long day at the hospital, but maybe she didn’t want Naruto to do it for her, or maybe she thinks he just wants to get her naked, which he _does,_ but not like that, not right now anyway, but.

“Naruto—”

“I just figured—” he rushes, “Since you worked a double and you probably pushed yourself ‘cause that’s just what you _do,_ and so you probably wanna clean up and relax and, um, it’s hot, and it’s in your bathroom, so I’m not gonna bother you or anything, I swear I only went in there to put the water on and, um, I’m just gonna—gonna go. Over here. And...not say anything else.”

Naruto starts inching back toward the kitchen, still with a wince plastered to his face, unwilling to look at Sakura because he probably got this whole thing wrong, and now he feels bad about this whole plan to have sex because he never did this kinda stuff for her before, and now he did it and he realizes he doesn’t even _care_ if she wants to have sex (well, he does, but) he just wants to do something nice for her.

Before Naruto can make his escape, Sakura kicks aside her boots, steps into the house, and walks up to him. Naruto freezes, eyes shut tight, bracing himself for a hit he _knows_ is coming, but then—

“Thank you, Naruto,” Sakura says softly, and then she kisses him on the cheek, and then she takes her tea and goes upstairs, and Naruto stands in that exact spot for ten whole minutes, blushing furiously and trying to keep from screaming in celebration. (He eventually compromises with a fist pump, and then he grins and shuts himself in his own room, content to leave Sakura alone for the rest of the night, to make sure the next part of his plan is good to go.)


	3. Chapter 3

Naruto has an early meeting with Tsunade and Shikamaru that’s _probably_ going to wind up involving Kakashi and the council, and he knows Sakura promised Shizune to help with researching some plant thing today. And Sakura _always_ forgets to eat when she’s doing research, and then she comes home starving and usually in a bad mood, and then sometimes she has to go work at the hospital like that, and then she won’t even get to eat real food, and Naruto is definitely not going to let that happen today.

So he makes her (and himself, ‘cause duh) a bento. It’s a really simple one—he’s kinda worked out how to cook things other than cup ramen, but he still sucks at it, and besides, the bento Sasuke made once were a billion times better, but he figures a really simple bento is better than _no_ food. Then he sticks hers in the fridge and writes a note saying _Sakura-chan~ Bento in the fridge! Do your best today. -Naruto._

And then, he grabs his and high-tails it out the door before he winds up late. Though Kakashi definitely didn’t get to tell him off for that, ever, Hokage or not.

 

* * *

 

That’s the only part of his plan that he can really work on for today—the meeting with Kakashi goes on forever, and then two councilors had to come in and drag it on even more, and _then_ Shikamaru said he promised Temari to make Naruto read a _really thick_ book about Sunagakure’s history, and Gaara told Temari to tell Shikamaru to tell him that he should also read this scroll they found about jinchuriki and seals and stuff (like he wouldn’t read that anyway), and all his friends are awful and way too involved in his quest to become the greatest Hokage ever.

Naruto doesn’t even finish until late, and reading always makes him sleepy. Shikamaru is passed out in a chair in the back of the library, and has probably been asleep for hours, the traitor. Naruto leaves him there, and then grabs a couple more books he came across when the ones he was reading referenced them, and takes them home with him so he can at least read the rest at home instead of in a hard wooden chair while the librarian glares at him like he’s gonna suddenly start making noise when he’s been quiet (mostly) the whole time.

He’s practically dragging his feet when he walks in the door, and he manages to make it to the kotatsu without faceplanting. Success!

He brings out the books he took home, and then the sandwich he picked up on the way back, and he chews and reads on autopilot, his eyes just barely managing to stay open. But the stuff he’s reading is important. Since Uzushio fell, a lot of information about seals has disappeared, and it basically makes sealing anything with an unfamiliar method really risky. Most hidden villages that still exist don’t understand enough about the basic foundation of seals, they just use the ones they already know work and don’t modify them for what they’re sealing.

But since the treaty between the nations, there’s been a lot easier access to all the scrolls and books in their libraries, and compiling all of them can at least help them start to figure out some of this stuff. There’s even been talk of sending out a team to find some of the surviving villagers of Uzushio that have scattered—including descendants of the Uzumaki clan. Some of the texts even mention the clan a couple of times, though it’s usually not anything about its people or whatever, just that they had a hand in developing some of the seals they’re talking about.

But Naruto still kinda likes hearing about them. He likes knowing that the seals he’s trying to learn are something that his clan had a hand in designing. It’s kinda like a part of them.

Plus his dad knew a lot about seals. He learned from Uzushio’s seals. That’s how he could do his Body Flicker so effectively, and how he did the seal for Kurama, and considering that’s still on Naruto’s stomach, he figures it’s probably important that he learns about it.

Plus, Kurama helps him a little bit. He’s not really all that smart about ninja stuff, since he’s a chakra being and all the seals and jutsu and technicalities apparently don’t _mean_ anything to him, ‘cause he’s _special—_

_“Watch it, brat. I’m an ancient chakra being created by—”_

“The Sage of Six Paths himself, the most powerful and blah blah blah,” Naruto drawls, rolling his eyes. “I _know._ You don’t gotta keep reminding me, you dumb fox. I met the guy. And I killed his mom, or whatever,” Naruto scrunches up his face.

_“I don’t know what you expect to learn of that place from me. That Mito bitch did not speak to me of it, and I was still chained when it died.”_

Naruto sighs and scrubs at his head. Would it kill Kurama to talk about shit like a normal person? Or a normal chakra-beast, whatever. “I’m not trying to learn about Uzushio, not really. I’m just trying to learn about seals. So you could stop being so mean about it, since you’re stuck in one with me.” Naruto stuck his tongue out, even though he was still just facing the books laid out on the table. He still hasn’t figured out how to talk to Kurama like this without talking out loud. Sometimes Kurama hears his thoughts and sometimes he doesn’t, and Naruto doesn’t know how to tell the difference between _thoughts._ Just that Kurama tends to hear all the wrong shit and interrupt him at the worst times. “Besides, sometimes all that weird stuff you say about chakra helps.”

_“It’s not ‘weird’, stupid kit. Just because shinobi learned to use chakra doesn’t mean you understand its—”_

“Bah! I know! Essences and consciousness and whatever. I’m just saying that—”

“Naruto?”

Naruto looks up and turns his head to see Sakura, leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen and frowning at him suspiciously.

“Sakura-chan,” he says happily, trying not to give away how tired he is.

“Who’re you talking to?”

Naruto blinks, glancing down at the books on the table, and then says “Oh. Just Kurama. He’s trying to help me figure out all this stuff about seals—”

 _“Not that you’re listening,”_ Kurama cuts in.

“I am too listening!” Naruto says. “Just ‘cause you don’t make any sense ever!” He winces at the volume of his own voice and looks back at Sakura apologetically. “Ah, sorry, Sakura-chan. He’s really noisy today.”

_“I’m not the noisy one, brat. I don’t blab useless nonsense when I mate my vixens so—”_

“Shut up! Shut up, oh my _gods!_ ” Naruto grabs the sides of his head and shakes it, turning a violent shade of red, and he can hear Kurama laughing at him.

“Naruto?” Sakura prods, somewhere between concerned and confused.

“Sorry! Sorry, Sakura-chan. I can be quiet now. I’ve just gotta get through this book so I can tell the team in Kumo what to look for and—ah, you don’t need to know about this boring stuff, just. Sorry if I was being loud.”

Sakura is frowning at him, and Naruto shifts uncomfortably and can’t help feeling like he’s done or said something wrong. But Sakura just gives him a funny look and then says “Alright. Don’t stay up too late.” Then she walks out of the room and Naruto hears the shower turn on in the distance.

_“She’s bathing, go mount her and—”_

“Stop!” Naruto shouts, hitting his own head again. “Seriously, Kurama! Shut up about that stuff or I’m bringing out the red gates!”

Kurama just laughs again while Naruto claws at his own head and tries to fight the blush staining his cheeks.

 

An hour later, when Sakura pads back downstairs to check on Naruto, he’s passed out at the kotatsu, face pressed into the pages of one of the scrolls and drooling. She can’t help but smile.


	4. Chapter 4

The next step of the first step of the Sex With Sakura Two-Step Plan is to get Sakura to go on a date with him. Which is... Well, it’s kind of confusing, since technically they’re already dating, except they’re not really dating each other, or they are, but not _just_ each other, and they do stuff together sometimes with the three of them, like date stuff. And then Sakura and Naruto do stuff together, sometimes, too, but _not_ date stuff, so.

It’s all a little mixed up. But Naruto figures that’s okay, he can work with it, so he waits until Sakura and him are both free for a night (which still winds up being an entire week since Sasuke left) and he asks if she wants to go get dinner somewhere.

“Sure,” she says, too easily. “Where?”

Naruto’s instinct is to say ramen, but that’s totally not gonna work with the plan, so he tamps it down and says “You pick.”

They wind up at this small seafood place, and Naruto wonders if he should’ve, like, dressed up, or brought flowers or something. But Sakura is wearing her usual casual clothes, and it’s not a super fancy place, and it’s not like she would have anywhere to put the flowers while they were eating anyway.

It gets surprisingly easy from there. They both order, and then they start talking about whatever crosses their minds—what happened at work, how the village is doing with the last of the rebuilding, the latest relationships between the Konoha 11 (or 12, since Sasuke is back, or 9, since Team 7 are dating each other and all).

Naruto’s not dumb enough to try to pay for both of them, because the last time he and Sasuke tried to pull that, she hit them both and told the server to split it three ways. So they each pay half, and then they walk home slowly, and Naruto gets kind of fuzzy-headed while he watches Sakura chat about Ino’s latest string of shortcomings in that fond way she has. It’s just, Sakura is really pretty. _Really_ pretty. But she’s also super-smart, and kind, and crazy strong, and she’s an amazing kunoichi and sometimes Naruto feels like everyone forgets about how awesome she is just ‘cause she’s on a team with him and Sasuke, and he doesn’t like that.

There’s a reason Naruto had a crush on her for so long, even when she was still obsessed with Sasuke and thought he was lucky for not having parents and really dumb all the time. Plus he worries that she doesn’t think he cares about her anymore, because he spent so long chasing Sasuke to the ends of the Earth, and fighting him, and basically declaring his undying devotion when he thought he was gonna die, and, well. Sometimes he thinks maybe Sakura is jealous of that. Or something.

Even though she’s the one that makes them work in the first place. Because by now it should be pretty fucking obvious that if Naruto and Sasuke were trying to date just each other, they’d wind up killing each other in the first week.

She’s _amazing._

Naruto is light-headed by the time they reach the house, and he feels kinda drunk even though he hasn’t had anything to drink, and Sakura has looped an arm around his waist and when had that happened? Shoot, he was probably stumbling like an idiot and not paying attention to a word she said.

He pulls away, trying to fumble his way through an apology—he still has, like, three more steps in the first step of the plan, okay? He can’t fuck this up now.

But Sakura just huffs and hauls his arm over her shoulders and helps take him upstairs, and then she shoves him down into his own bed and calls him an idiot.

Then she jumps on top of him.

Naruto is so shocked that he forgets to move. Sakura has to whack at him just to get him to wake up, and then she kisses him, wet and soft and warm, and okay, yeah, Naruto is totally on board with this now.

His hands flutter around her neck and her shoulders, and then slide down to her waist and he fingers the end of her dress-thing, but before he can do anything with it, she efficiently strips him of his own shirt and shorts, then presses herself back down as her tongue dives back into his mouth.

Naruto careens up, chasing her taste, and finally gets his hands moving to strip her dress off, then the shirt beneath, then the sports bra (which Naruto is ever-thankful for, because they are 100% easier to take off than the strappy kind). And then he has a couple of handfuls of boobs, and his mind kind of whites out like it always does, because this is still his favorite part.

Sakura seems playfully annoyed with him, pulling away and huffing because he kind of forgot how to work his mouth now that he’s putting all his effort into working his hands, because _boobs,_ okay? But Sakura leans back enough that his hands don’t reach anymore, so he tries to follow only she shoves him back down by his shoulders, and Naruto juts out his lower lip and whines.

“Shush,” she says, still with a hint of a smile. “You still get to look.” Then she starts to work off her shorts while she’s still straddling Naruto’s hips, and she shifts a little and her leg brushes against his erection through his boxers. Naruto bites his lip and flushes, almost in an embarrassed way.

Sakura blows out an amused breath and smiles. “I was kind of expecting that to be there, you know.”

“Yeah, but like—” Naruto cuts off, unsure of what to say, and then just shrugs. Sakura just laughs again. Then she hooks her fingers around the elastic of Naruto’s boxers and tells him to lift his hips.

She drags his boxers down and off in one quick motion, and his cock springs up against his stomach. Sakura giggles and pokes at it playfully, smiling when she says “I always forget how _bouncy.”_

“Sakuraaaa,” Naruto whines, and moves his hand brush over it briefly, just barely. “It’s—it’s supposed to be manly, and, like, happy to see you, or whatever. Not _bouncy.”_

Sakura snorts. “Bouncy,” she declares. She falls forward then, crashing their mouths together on an inhale, sucking in his bottom lip and sliding her hands up and down his chest, back and forth over his nipples. Naruto brings his own hands up her sides, dips around her back, and then slides them back around to cup her breasts.

He can’t help it—he pushes them up, then removes his hands, lets them fall back with gravity, and says into her mouth “Bouncy.”

She pulls back and smacks him over the ear. But she’s smiling, still, and it was a love-tap, hardly even painful at all, and Naruto can’t help but grin back up at her.

This is _fun._

 _They’re_ fun. Together.

“Whatever, _Bouncy Dick,_ I’m getting impatient.” She lifts her hips up and starts dragging her panties down, falling to the side a little so she can work them off.

Naruto watches her, enraptured, and says “Please don’t let Sai hear you call me that.”

She bursts out laughing—hard enough that she actually stops taking her panties off—so Naruto sits up and slides them down her calves and off, grinning infectiously at her laughter. “Oh, gods,” she says, breathless. She lays with her back on the bed and moves her hands over her stomach, catching her breath.

Naruto slides a hand up her thigh, coming to rest over her hipbone, and he lets his eyes roam from top to bottom, soaking in her skin and her curves and her lingering smile. “Have I told you how happy I am you’re naturally pink?” He says, moving his hand up and down her thigh again.

“Fsh,” is her reply, and then she swipes up at his head and grabs two fistfuls of hair to shove his head down toward her cunt. Naruto gulps in a breath of her scent—holy _shit—_ and she says, aloof, “Every time I undress in your presence, unfortunately.”

“It’s just so...pink,” he settles on, and then before she gets the chance to smack him or something, he leans in the last few inches and swipes his tongue over her.

Sakura settles on laughing at that, instead, and he can’t help but press his lips to it, to feel the faint vibrations until they’re sucked into a gasp when he darts his tongue out and in. Sakura’s fingers tighten almost painfully in his hair, and one day he’s gonna shave it all off and _then_ what will she grab? Her and Sasuke both, they’re trying to pull all his hair out, he swears.

He runs his hands to the middle of her thighs and nudges them apart, opening her up, and then he sets to work. He’s gotten way better at this after the first couple disastrous attempts, when he’d finally sucked it up and gone to Ino and asked how to do it right, and after she’d laughed at him, and then dragged an unwilling Shikamaru and an uncomfortable Chouji and forced him to repeat it, she’d finally sat her boys down and given them a very long, _very_ detailed explanation.

Chouji had even stopped eating his chips halfway through to listen, mouth gaping.

But Naruto had learned, okay? And now he’s here and he’s got Sakura laid out all soft and wet beneath him and he uses every trick he knows how to use and drives her toward the tipping point. Swiping his tongue, plunging it in, circling it around her clit, then pressing his whole mouth and sucking, and Sakura pulls at his hair and squirms her hips and keeps sucking in these tiny gasps. And usually Sasuke will be up there kissing her, touching her breasts, sucking bruises into her neck, so Naruto never gets to hear all these sounds and even when he does, he’s never quite sure if it’s him or Sasuke that’s causing them, but this time he knows it’s him, knows they’re just for him, and he’d never deny Sasuke this but just for tonight, he decides to be greedy and keep them for himself.

Naruto can feel Sakura hovering just over the edge, and he brings his thumb up to her clit and circles it while his tongue presses into her and explores, and then Sakura lets out a beautiful moan and her thighs clamp down around his head and he laps up the wetness spilling onto his tongue.

He hums as she shakes through it, clutching at his hair and pressing her thighs together and she breathes out “Oh. Oh.”

She finally releases her grip from his head and Naruto lifts his head, a grin spreading across his face as her thighs fall back to the bed. He crawls up over her, until his face is right above hers, and says “So? Aren’t I getting good? I’m totally awesome, right?”

For a second—a fleeting, glorious second—she looks like she’s about to say yes. But then she huffs and claps him in the back of the head and says “Don’t get cocky.”

He waggles his eyebrows ridiculously. “But cupcake, I’m already _cock_ -y.” Then he presses his cock against her hip.

“Oh my _gods,”_ she groans, and her hands come up lightning-fast to his ears, and then she’s pulling on them _way too hard_ and hissing “What did I say about pet names?”

“Ow ow ow!” He whines, “No pet names! Pet names are bad, they’re bad and I’ll never use them if I wanna get laid ever again and _Sakura-chan,_ I need my ears to be a ninja!”

She releases them, apparently appeased, and he pouts and looks at her despondently. He presses his cock just a little more firmly against her hip. “Sakuraaa,” he says, ending on a whine, high-pitched and animalistic and almost definitely a side-effect of spending too much time listening to Kurama.

Sakura sighs, and then brings her hands up again—Naruto winces, but she’s gentle—and she cradles his head and brings it down so their lips can meet. She chases her own taste out of the corners of his mouth, and Naruto’s heady with it, rubbing himself on her hip, straining.

She finally moves her hands down, nudging him until he’s right over her. She spreads her legs again and he nearly loses it when she wraps her fingers around his cock to guide him in. But then she just says “Breathe, stupid,” against his mouth, and she lifts her hips just as he presses his forward, and he slides right in. (Which is why he loves going down on her first.)

She doesn’t seem to change her breathing pattern, but Naruto’s is suddenly erratic as he takes in the feel of it, of her around him, warm and tight and wet. He ducks his head down to press into her neck and breathe in the scent of her sweat-sheen skin, and he’s never asked but he thinks his sense of smell is better than most people’s, except maybe Inuzuka clan members, and he thinks it would be kinda weird to ask Kurama about it so he never has.

But she smells like spring, like cherry blossoms in spring, and he’s never told her because he’s pretty sure she would hit him and tell him it was a funny joke, except it’s not. She really does, and he wishes he could figure out how to tell her in a way that didn’t sound dumb, or make fun, and he wishes she could see how _amazing_ she smells. It drives him mad, all the time, and when the cherry blossoms pop up every spring he spends a good couple of weeks walking around dazed and half-hard because it’s like smelling her everywhere, all the time.

“So, are you gonna move, or were you just planning on lying there?”

Naruto jerks forward, then props himself up on his arms so he can look at her face. She’s a little annoyed, a little amused, and a little bit aroused—his favorite combination.

He laughs sheepishly and says “Ah—sorry, Sakura-chan. I got a little distracted.”

Her eyebrows shoot upward and says says, darkly, “Oh?”

“About you! Er, with you!” He fumbles, and then tries to pull his hands back to show his palms in apology, except he kind of bungles that, and he winds up kind of flopping down on top of her in a not-so-sexy way, and then he’s shouting out apologies again and picking himself back up. “I’m so sorry! I forgot, with my arms, and then I was trying, but I didn’t think I, and then I’m sorry!”

Sakura is shaking beneath him (and around him, oh _hell)_ and at first he thinks it’s anger but then he realizes it’s laughter, it’s _fond_ laughter, and he’s so happy he could burst. (They’re so happy, there’s so much _happiness_ between them, everything is laughter and it’s just so bright.)

“You’re hopeless,” she says, still smiling, still laughing. “You’re so hopeless, Naruto.” And her hands come up to his face and her thumbs trace the whisker marks on his cheeks and she just looks at him, and Naruto can’t really help but fall in love all over again, like he’s 12, except now he’s here and he has her and—

Well, he should probably do something about that.

He presses their mouths together just as he begins to move, rocking his hips slowly as her legs slide higher. He swallows all her sounds this time—greedy, so greedy—and brings one of his hands up to trace ticklish patterns over and around her nipple. She bites playfully at his mouth, catching his lips and his tongue between her teeth before releasing, and then she noses his head until it’s buried back against her neck. She urges him to move faster. Her fingers grip at his back and her legs push and pull with his rhythm, speeding up until he starts to lose it. He mouths at her neck, tasting her and panting against her skin, and his hips start faltering in their rhythm.

Heat builds in his head and through his body, and he chants her name helplessly, whining again, desperate. “Sakura, Sakura, please, Sakura, please, I, Sak’ra.” He doesn’t know what he’s saying, or what he’s asking for, if he’s asking for anything. He just _wants,_ wants her and wants this and wants. “Please,” he repeats, like he knows what it means, like it’s the last thing he could ever want.

“Yes,” he hears her breathe out, and he doesn’t know if she understands—can’t understand everything, not all of it, impossible, but—maybe, even so. His hips stutter, and he whimpers into the dark, sticky warmth of the curve of her neck as he comes, his breath catching on her scent. His head spins and he’s pressed so deep. He can feel her throbbing, pulsing around him and beneath him, and he can’t tell if it’s his heartbeat or hers that’s vibrating through their bodies. (It’s both.)

He lets himself drift for a good while, floating and happy and thankful that she came again, because if she hadn’t Naruto is pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to function enough to manage it. That’s usually Sasuke’s job, anyway. Naruto is useless for ten minutes at least after he comes, they both know this.

He does manage to tap his hand against her ribcage—a gentle warning—before he slips out and collapses next to her, so he doesn’t suffocate her. He keeps his arm draped over her chest, though, just over her soft middle, rising and falling with her breath.

It’s way, way too soon before he feels her poke his side and ask if he’s alive.

“Mmm,” is all he manages. It’s a “maybe” and not a yes.

She huffs, but it’s not a bad sound, and then Naruto feels a sheet dragged up over them both and she says “Sleep.”

Naruto is already there.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, crap. Sorry it took so long. Work's been crazy and I've spent most of this last week baked as a triple-fudge cake.
> 
> .

Sakura wakes up slowly, knowing already that it’s the kind of rare, lazy morning that means she has nowhere to be until later. It’s warm, and she’s almost uncomfortably sticky—actually, wet, between her thighs, and she spares half a thought about how long it’s been since her last period until she remembers. She’s smiling before she even opens her eyes. Naruto has his face smothered in a pillow, his arm curling around her middle and one leg thrown over hers. His bare ass is on display, the sheets twisted off to the side.

She muffles a snort and then slips out of bed to clean herself up and find some clothes, leaving Naruto to sleep for another hour while she makes herself some strong tea and enjoys a blissfully quiet morning to herself.

It had taken her stupidly long to realize what he was doing, and then even a bit longer after that to understand that he thought he had to. To be fair, she’d been a little dizzied by the idea of doing this without Sasuke. She was ecstatic that Sasuke trusted them this much, but when the reality hit and Sasuke was away, she’d gotten a little turned around.

She just didn’t want to mess with what they had. It was working, so why change anything? Except for the part where it wasn’t working as well as it could be, not when both her and Naruto had been wound so tightly by the time of Sasuke’s return that they’d been at each other’s throats within seconds of being in the same space.

She was half-expecting the sex to be like that, as well. Without Sasuke as a buffer, she’d been worried.

And then she realized she just thought of Sasuke as a buffer. To protect her. From Naruto, who loved her. Naruto, who has loved her as long as she’s loved Sasuke, and who would never hurt her.

She’d been so riddled with shame that she’d disappeared into her work at the hospital just to reassure herself that she was still capable of putting good into the world.

And then Naruto had started flirting with her. Like he was courting her. Like he needed to convince her to tolerate his presence, let alone sleep with him, and before she’d let the guilt overrun her again, she’d finally just dragged him into bed herself.

She feels so stupid for ever believing Naruto would do anything other than bend over backwards to please her. It’s _Naruto._

Sakura wonders if Sasuke knew how much she’d needed this when he suggested it. Not the sex—she’d learned to pleasure herself a long time ago, thank you, she could manage a couple of weeks if she honestly needed to, not that she didn’t get frustrated—but to be able to see the way she’d been thinking of Naruto in this relationship, and how it wasn’t right. She wasn’t right.

And it wasn’t fair.

It fills her with self-loathing that Sasuke could’ve seen this when she couldn’t, could’ve read into her thought patterns and seen this and decided to intervene. More than likely he hadn’t—more than likely, he’d simply wanted to keep them happy, and figured the easiest course of action to do that was to finally take advantage of the fact that there were three of them.

Regardless, she’s grateful. He’d fixed them before they’d even known anything was wrong. She wonders if that was what he intended to do.

She sits, serenely sipping her tea and reading a catalogue about senbon (she’s pondering incorporating them into her fighting style and her medical practice, kind of like Haku had) while she listens for signs of life from the bedroom.

It takes a good forty-five minutes, but then Naruto comes pounding down the stairs, struggling into his clothes, wailing about oversleeping and the horror at the idea that they might not let him become Hokage if he’s late to everything, all the time. (She doesn’t remind him that Kakashi is Hokage right now, because she likes to watch him squirm.)

“Crap, crap, Shikamaru is gonna kill me. No, he’s too lazy, he’ll get Temari and she’ll do it. Agh, they should’ve never made her ambassador, she’s gonna kill me and turn me into a puppet for her brother, and then she’ll have me do whatever Gaara wants and—Shit, where’s my hitai-ate? Damn it! Whatever, it’s not like there’s a mission, they all probably know I’m loyal to Konoha, right? Unless they call an emergency summit and—good morning, Sakura-chan!” He interjects, still frantically darting around their mess of a living room, looking for his hitai-ate.

Sakura hums in amusement and offers no help.

He flails about for another minutes—finds his hitai-ate in the couch cushions and fails to discover that his shirt is on backwards—and he’s a second away from dashing out the door when Sakura calls out sharply “Naruto!”

He freezes, and turns toward her, stilted.

“Come here a moment.”

He looks a little terrified (as he well should) but he walks up to her anyway. She has to nudge him just a bit further forward, but then he’s finally in range, and she reaches up to grip around the back of his neck. She drags his face down, plants a kiss on his mouth, and then pushes him away again.

He stands there, kind of dazed and stupid.

“Leave before they strip you of your title,” she says with a threatening lilt in her voice.

Naruto yelps and them scrambles for the door, “They can’t do that! There’s _no way_ they can do that!”

(They can’t—Naruto can’t be stripped of a title he doesn’t even have yet, and they probably wouldn’t anyway.)

She chuckles into her teacup and the door shuts behind Naruto, leaving her in peaceful silence once again.

(Much later, when Naruto is pulling an all-nighter in the library and she is alone, she will reach between her legs and think of Naruto’s mouth, and she will come with Naruto’s name heavy on her tongue. And then, she will do it again, with Sasuke’s mouth and Sasuke’s name, and she will lie there afterward, spent and breathless, and wonder how it is she could be so lucky.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's an update, just before I leave for vacation. Dunno about the internet situation up North since it's hit or miss (mostly miss, heh) but this should definitely tide you over. :)
> 
> Good news is, I get a whole week to write. It's gonna be dope.
> 
> Enjoy~!
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Sasuke returns in the middle of the night, after Dog—his frequent ANBU partner who Sasuke suspects has a much closer relationship to their Hokage than he lets on—leaves their mission report in a sealed scroll on the Hokage’s desk. They will have to return in the morning to confirm in person, but until then, there’s no reason Sasuke can’t return home and get some sleep.

He undoes the seals on the door swiftly and silently, and he expects the house to be quiet and dark. The first sign that something is not as he expects is the light pouring in from the kitchen doorway. Sasuke freezes, instantly activating his sharingan so he’s prepared for a possible intrusion, although any ninja moronic enough to turn on a light while infiltrating a shinobi residence wouldn’t be worth the chakra.

His ears catch on laughter, though, and a soft clapping sound that doesn’t indicate any sort of intrusion. Sasuke relaxes his posture, puts down his pack and takes off his ANBU vest before he walks toward the kitchen doorway. He finds his two bedmates, clad in only their underwear, and coated entirely in white powder, which they are apparently trying to spread more thoroughly all over each other. Judging by the baking supplies scattered around the kitchen counters and the crumpled bag of flour on the floor, Sasuke is guessing they were attempting to bake. Naked. In the middle of the night.

Sasuke just raises his eyebrows and stares. Naruto has his arms locked around Sakura’s waist and she’s squirming to get away, giggling, and her fingertips are slipping off every surface they come in contact with because everything is coated in flour.

Her eyes catch on Sasuke in the doorway, and she pauses in her escape attempts, going limp in Naruto’s arms and smiling up at him. “Sasuke-kun! You’re home early.”

“Hey, bastard!” Naruto says happily, and flour is stuck in the whisker marks on his cheeks, turning them pure white.

Sasuke stares for just another moment, taking in the absolute wreckage that is their kitchen, and decides that none of this is going to be his problem. He lets out a “Hn,” and then turns to walk through the dark toward their bedroom. He hears Naruto whining, something like “Hey, where’re you going?”

Sasuke doesn’t answer. It’s patently obvious where he’s going—to sleep, away from this ridiculousness—but that’s apparently not apparent to Naruto, who scrambles across the powdery tile and comes flying out of the kitchen, probably leaving white footprints on their wooden floors.

Sasuke expects Naruto’s enthusiastic attempt at tackling him from behind, so he sidesteps neatly before he winds up coated in half of Naruto’s flour. What he doesn’t expect is for Sakura to back Naruto up, anticipating his side-step and jumping up to wrap around him, arms grasping around his collarbone and legs latching around his midsection.

Sasuke stumbles a bit, which ends up being a fatal mistake because it gives Naruto long enough to recover and change his direction until he’s wrapping around Sasuke as well, happily calling out his name while the both of them laugh.

Sasuke scowls, attempts to throw them both off, and shouts “Off! Off! You’re coated in flour!”

“Duh,” Naruto responds, and then shakes out his hair right in front of Sasuke’s face, leaving a cloud of white to suffocate him.

“We were going to bake welcome-home cupcakes, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura says sweetly. Sasuke curses. Leaving her alone with Naruto has poisoned her. He should’ve left them sex-deprived and snappish, not given them permission to...to _bake._

“I hate cupcakes,” Sasuke argues, like that’s what matters in this situation. He’s been effectively stopped from moving any closer to the bedroom, but he wouldn’t want to spread the flour mess anyway.

“They weren’t for _you,”_ Naruto says, like it should be obvious, and then smacks one of his powdery hands right on Sasuke’s face.

Sasuke jerks back and says “God damn it!” and then he loses his footing under the weight of the both of them, and they all go tumbling to the floor. Sasuke coughs, his mouth dry from breathing in all this flour. His ANBU uniform is absolutely coated, and it’s black for a reason, that reason being _stealth in the dark_ which doesn’t work if it’s got a bunch of flour stains all over it, like big white patches of ‘look over here’, and why he ever thought to let them do anything on their own—

Sakura’s constant giggling and Naruto’s huffs of laughter as they squirm over and around him turn into something else very suddenly, and Sasuke stills his attempts to throw them off. Of course the flour was foreplay. The baking itself was foreplay. They’re _naked,_ or next to, so he imagines they’d probably be laid out on the kitchen floor fucking into next week if he hadn’t come home early.

Apparently, their plan is still to fuck into next week, because they start biting at each other’s mouths, reaching over him to do it, and Sasuke has a front row seat. One of Naruto’s hands is pressing down against Sasuke’s chest for balance, the other is sliding beneath Sakura’s bra, cupping the side of her breast. Sakura is already making little breathy whimpers into the kiss, and her fingers clench and unclench at the fabric around his thighs.

Sasuke just wants sleep. He hadn’t planned on—whatever the hell they think this is, baking or fucking or both. And he certainly has no intention of staying up just to watch them do it.

He sighs, exceptionally loud, but he doesn’t push them off. Even though they seem to be having an exceptionally good time using him as a rug. He’d just like to be let up without having to use his somewhat depleted chakra reserves to do it, so he can strip from his flour-coated ANBU uniform and crawl into bed.

They pull apart, Sakura gasping and dragging herself over Sasuke, until she’s basically on top of him. Naruto glances over to Sasuke like he’s surprised to find him there, and Sasuke just raises his eyebrows and waits for the idiot to do something useful. Like get off of him.

He expects too much.

Instead, Naruto just grins and uses the hand gripping the front of Sasuke’s uniform to pull him into a kiss. It barely lasts a moment because suddenly Sasuke gets a mouth full of _flour,_ and he shoves at Naruto until he’s thumping to the floor beside him, trying to spit out the awful taste and saying “Moron! You taste disgusting.”

“Well, _now_ I do,” Naruto quips back, righting himself so he can kneel over Sasuke’s leg to prevent him from standing. “When’s the last time you brushed your teeth, before your mission?”

Sasuke just kicks him off again, little puffs of white exploding with every movement they make. He winds up shoving Sakura off as well, and then both of them are glaring at him as if all of this is somehow his fault. He’s not the one who decided to try baking naked in the middle of the night. Sasuke stands and tries to brush some of the worst flour smudges off, then he snaps “I’m going to bed. If you’re gonna fuck do it quietly.” He doesn’t bother looking back as he marches up the stairs and toward their bedroom, heedless of the flour he’s dragging everywhere. The whole house will probably be coated by morning. Sasuke intends to make Naruto and Sakura clean it up, since they’re the idiots who decided to dump an entire bag of flour over each other instead of using it for its intended purpose.

He doesn’t see the appeal of using flour in foreplay. (He doesn’t quite understand the appeal of anything edible in foreplay, but supposedly people do that.) But the two of them are free to use whatever kind of ridiculous props they want, so long as they leave him out of it so he can sleep.

He strips off his clothing and leaves it in a pile in the corner, so at least his bed will remain largely flour-free. He does brush his teeth and wash the flour from his face before he crawls into bed, intending to drop immediately into sleep and ignore whatever Sakura and Naruto are doing downstairs.

This doesn’t go to plan. Of course not. Because he lives with these two absolute idiots.

No, instead, about two minutes after he settles down, the bed is suddenly bouncing as two people jump on to it and starfish. Sasuke gets a hand whacking into his nose, and he flails around until Naruto’s errant limb is back in his own damn space. “What the _fuck—”_ he starts.

“We missed you,” Sakura says kindly while Naruto paws at him, dragging him toward the two of them, who are—

Who are much the same as they were downstairs, clad in their underwear and still coated in flour. In his bed.

He’s going to kill them.

Naruto’s mouth latches on to his neck, and his hands start roaming over Sasuke’s hips while Sakura’s hand comes up to brush down his cheek and tilt his face toward the side she’s on, so their eyes meet in the dark. If they honestly think he’s going to forget about the flour just because they—

Naruto’s hand presses against Sasuke’s cock over his boxers, and Sasuke gasps involuntarily.

He’s still going to kill them. But maybe after this.

Naruto chuckles like he thinks he’s won (he hasn’t) and says “Gotcha.” But his hand keeps pressing, teasing over the fabric while Sasuke’s cock fills and tingles of arousal shoot down his spine. He clenches his teeth, a little pissed that Naruto is manipulating him like this, but Sakura swallows down his scowl into a plunging kiss, both her hands bracketing Sasuke’s head and pulling him forward.

She, at least, doesn’t taste like flour (much) and she kisses him so fiercely he forgets to breathe.

Naruto releases his neck and slides down Sasuke’s body, pulling his boxers with, and his cock is just barely springing free before Naruto sucks it down. Sasuke swears against Sakura’s soft mouth, and his hips buck up. Naruto’s arm shoves him back to the bed and he pulls off to say “Oi, bastard, watch it!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sasuke shoots back, still speaking around Sakura pressing her lips against his.

“Is that any way to talk to the guy sucking your di—”

“Both of you, shut it,” Sakura snaps, releasing Sasuke’s mouth momentarily. He uses that brief moment to gulp in air before Sakura goes back to attempting to drink it from his lungs.

“Don’t look at me, my mouth is busy down here,” Naruto says defensively, and then licks a stripe up Sasuke’s cock before sucking in the tip. Sasuke stifles a groan and pushes his hips up against the arm Naruto’s using to pin him to the bed.

Sakura sighs and then works herself up to a sitting position before she swings her legs over to straddle Sasuke’s stomach, her palms pressing against his chest as she looks down at him. Sasuke can still see smudges of flour all over her, but most of it has rubbed off by now. She looks down at him with a flat, serious expression and asks “What do you want?”

At that exact moment (it’s definitely on purpose,) Naruto seals his lips around Sasuke’s cock and sucks, and all that Sasuke manages to get out is a kind of strangled gasp. He kind of wants _sleep,_ actually, but now that he’s here he just wants to come and then go to sleep, and as long as Naruto keeps doing what he’s doing—

Naruto pulls away, and Sasuke kind of wants to hit him because he was finally getting close. His head is hidden behind Sakura’s body, but he says “You’re gonna fuck Sakura and I’m gonna fuck your mouth.”

“Am I now?” Sasuke grits out between clenched teeth in a measured tone.

Naruto’s head pops around Sakura’s side as he looks up at Sasuke. “You got a better idea?”

Sasuke doesn’t, but he has a problem with following Naruto’s orders on principle. Before he can try to explain that to Naruto—which is sure to be a painstakingly slow endeavor—Sakura huffs and shifts her hips a little on top of Sasuke.

“Well no one’s fucking me unless someone actually _touches_ me first. My panties are bone dry.” _And still on,_ Sasuke adds mentally, but then Naruto’s head disappears back behind Sakura and he goes to work on Sasuke’s cock again, still just teasing him to the edge without actually bringing him there.

Sasuke swears and then decides that this will probably end sooner if he actively hurries it along, which means he’ll hopefully get to sleep sooner. He slides his hands up Sakura’s sides, still a little powdery, and then he pulls her forward a little so he can unhook her bra. She shifts again, lets Sasuke undo the hook and then slides it off her shoulders and throws it aside. Sasuke takes a moment just to look—it really has been quite a while, and even though it’s not like he’s _missed_ this, what with the mission keeping him busy, it’s not exactly boring either.

Sasuke’s never understood the fascination with large breasts (or the fascination with _any_ breasts, really) but Sakura proves the exception. For some unfathomable reason, she’s insecure about hers, although they still manage to be the only breasts Sasuke has ever been remotely interested in. (There is a small part of him that frequently feels the desire to beat up Ino for swaying Sakura into caring about any of this ridiculous bullshit, but he also knows Ino is an invaluable asset in that she provides a place for Sakura to vent.)

He swipes his thumbs over her nipples, teasing them hard, and then when Sakura blushes and bites her lip, he pulls her down until he can close his mouth around her nipple, attempting to mirror Naruto’s movements on Sasuke’s dick with his own tongue. Sakura keens and grinds her hips down. Sasuke switches between them, gently guiding her with his hands, and he teases with light scrapes of his teeth and swirls of his tongue.

Sasuke is managing to keep his composure relatively well considering Naruto’s dedication to fellatio, but he’s not going to last forever, and he keeps teasing Sakura’s nipples with his mouth while his hand tickles patterns downward and slips into her panties. She gasps above him, and he slides exploratory fingers over her, getting a little more insistent as he maps it out, slipping just the tip of his middle finger in between the folds to find her leaking warm wetness. He smiles, triumphant, and debates the merits of continuing on like this until at least him and Sakura have come.

But then Naruto decides to jump back in as ringleader, and he pulls off Sasuke with a wet sound, stumbling over to the drawer beside the bed to grab supplies before he hops back on the bed and his arms snake around Sakura’s middle, holding lube and a condom. He pulls her back against his chest, nuzzling at her neck. Sasuke presses his lips together and narrows slightly angry eyes at Naruto. But Naruto has his eyes closed, kissing against the curve of Sakura’s shoulder as his hands cup her breasts. “You ready enough?” he asks her, gentle, and Sasuke watches as she nods and lets Naruto maneuver her like a doll, pulling her up until he can work her panties down and off her legs. Naruto moves straight on to ripping the condom open with his teeth, sliding it down roughly over Sasuke and then pouring a puddle of lube all over the place with absolutely no finesse.

Sasuke is apparently supposed to just lie back and let this happen. Which, when he considers this, isn’t particularly problematic. If the other two want to do all the work, he’s perfectly content to let them, so long as they eventually get him off and then get off him so he can go to sleep.

Naruto keeps guiding Sakura, and guiding Sasuke’s cock, and then he uses one hand to bring Sakura’s hips down and the other to line up Sasuke’s cock, and then Sakura is sinking down onto him with a mewl. Sasuke’s mouth falls open and his eyes shut, because this heat and pressure is so different from Naruto’s mouth, so much tighter. He breathes and lets her adjust, trying to hold still and calm himself enough to keep from coming early.

Naruto scrambles off Sasuke’s legs and out from behind Sakura, and it shifts him inside of her. He gasps out her name, just a breath, and his hands come to grip at Sakura’s hips. Naruto breaks his daze by pressing their mouths together, but Sasuke can’t find it in himself to be pissed because this was Naruto’s idea and it turns out he’s pretty firmly on board with it so far. Naruto slides his wet lips against Sasuke’s skin, leaving a trail from Sasuke’s mouth to the corner of his jaw, and then he presses his mouth just beneath Sasuke’s right ear and whispers “Move.”

He doesn’t think, he just does, using his grip on Sakura’s hips to draw her up and then let her sink back down while his hips jerk in small, abortive movements. It only takes once for Sakura to moan and then shift her knees until she can angle herself, rocking her hips up and down while he moves inside her.

She’s slippery warmth and slides slowly at first, in and out nearly all the way, but then she leans back and the angle presses Sasuke’s cock against one side of her cunt, and then she starts speeding up, rocking up and down and gasping out breaths with every movement.

Sasuke pants open-mouthed, and his head is rushing with the pleasure of this, the adrenaline coursing through him that’s similar but still so different from the rush of battle. He doesn’t even know it’s happening, but Naruto is suddenly straddling his face and filling Sasuke’s mouth with his cock.

Sasuke breathes in sharply through his nose and takes it, moaning helplessly because damn Naruto for knowing exactly how much this gets him off. Naruto’s careful with him at first, only thrusting a little, but then Sakura says “Fuck, _boys,”_ and starts timing her movement with Naruto’s as he shifts his hips.

Sasuke keens, straining his head forward to try to reach more of Naruto’s cock. Naruto is panting above him, barely moving but refusing to pull back enough to slip from Sasuke’s mouth, so he brings his hands up to shove Naruto’s hips down with force. Naruto’s cock slides down his throat, and he swallows around it and nearly smiles when Naruto lets out a strangled moan that has too many ‘s’ sounds to be anything but his name.

Naruto reads him perfectly, though, and his hips start moving without restraint, fucking into Sasuke’s mouth until Naruto’s cock is shoved down his throat again and again. Sakura speeds up, leaning forward so she can keep speed, and all Sasuke can feel is pleasure, zinging up and down his body. He moans again and again, vibrating around Naruto’s cock and rocking his hips desperately, trying to delve as deep as he can into Sakura with a sweet slide.

Heat sweeps over his body like a tidal wave. His back arches and he lets out some sort of sound around Naruto’s cock as he comes, still slipping in and out of Sakura frantically. His mouth goes slack while Naruto keeps fucking into it, erratic and messy, and then Naruto’s come floods his mouth in hot bursts, and Sasuke swallows to keep from choking. He’s still dizzy from his own orgasm when Naruto rolls away, collapsing to one side of Sasuke and breathing heavily. Sakura is still straddling him, but he’s not in her anymore, his cock spent. She’s got her fingers circling around her clit, eyes closed and head leaned back while she tries to work herself to orgasm, and Sasuke finally gathers himself enough to sit up and draw her down.

He flips her so she’s got her back against the bed, and then he presses his body down against hers. He bats her own hands away as his fingers swipe through the mess of come before sliding up to circle around her clit, hard and fast. She arches and gasps and Sasuke swallows it down, licking into her mouth as his fingers circle without pause. Her moans come out in short bursts, muffled by the kiss, and then Sasuke brings his other hand down to slide two fingers inside of her. He curls them, pulling against her walls, and he presses both his fingers toward the others, inside and out, still circling.

Her entire body tenses and then she pulses around his fingers and pulls away from the kiss to gulp down air like she’s drowning. He works her through it, slowing his pace until he’s just lazily circling her clit and he slides his fingers out. He lets her have her mouth back, instead cleaning his fingers off with his tongue, and she opens heavy-lidded eyes to see and shudders.

Finally, he shifts so he’s no longer on top of her, collapsing face down into the column of space between Naruto and Sakura. He feels like he could melt into the mattress, and lets himself sink into the soft sheets. Before he can drop into sleep, Naruto shifts and then throws an arm over Sasuke’s lower back, and says, brass and loud, “How d’you like them cupcakes?”

Sasuke swipes out his hand until it connects with Naruto’s nose and he flinches and says “Ow!”

“Shut the hell up.”

He falls asleep in the middle of Naruto’s response, which is as good an insult as any to end the night with.


	7. Chapter 7

Naruto doesn’t get to go on all that many missions anymore, not since Team 7 was kinda-dissolved (again) and they each diverged into their own areas of concentration. Sasuke’s got ANBU missions, Sakura’s got the hospital, and Naruto’s got...a whole lot of meetings.

 _Boring_ meetings. And paperwork. Why the heck is there so much paperwork? Seriously, Konoha’s not made of trees! Well, it is, but if they keep using this much paper they’re gonna run out of trees and then Yamato is gonna cry at all the work he has to do to save their stupid village from deforestation.

And it sucks because this stuff is actually important. At least, Naruto’s starting to understand that it’s important, since Kakashi keeps refusing to do his own paperwork with Naruto around, waving and saying “Maa, it’s better if you practice.”

Except for how Naruto’s pretty sure Kakashi doesn’t know how to do most of this paperwork. Because Naruto is the only one who does it. While Kakashi gets to do all the fun parts, like talk with the other kages and organize missions and lead council meetings and actually do shit that doesn’t wind up shoved in an archive somewhere, gathering dust.

At least he’s got Shikamaru around to commiserate with. Though Shikamaru refuses to actually help him with the paperwork most of the time, claiming he’s an advisor, not a secretary. Naruto doesn’t even know what that means! It’s not like Shikamaru ever advises him on anything, he just sits around and sleeps and sometimes pokes at Naruto to attend his meetings on time. Even though Kakashi is never on time.

But he’s going crazy. He’s gonna snap and drill a rasengan through the walls of the Hokage tower out of boredom. The property damage will be massive. The trees they’d have to kill for the repairs...

If only for the trees’ sake, he needs to get the hell _out_ of here. Just for a little bit, just anything! Anything but paperwork and meetings _about_ paperwork.

He doesn’t think Kakashi is actually going to agree (because that would mean Kakashi needs to actually do his own paperwork for however long Naruto is gone) but he just eye-smiles and says “Why didn’t you ask sooner, Naruto?”

But he says yes. He says yes, and Naruto bursts in through the door with an ear-splitting grin on his face and says “I’ve got a mission!”

No one is actually home to hear him rejoice, which sucks. But he also gets to do it all over again when Sakura and Sasuke each get home, throwing his hands up in the air and smiling and saying “I’ve got a mission!”

“What kind of mission?” Sakura asks, and Naruto frowns and tells her he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t yet.

Sasuke just snorts and says “You’re gonna start another war.”

Naruto argues with that, but it devolves into yells of “Am not!” pretty quickly.

But whatever, everything is great because he’s got a _mission._ And it’s gonna be awesome. And he’s not gonna have to do paperwork until after.

Naruto has to wait until an appropriate mission comes in, something high-ranked but not long-term, since Kakashi refuses to get rid of his personal paperwork machine for longer than a couple weeks. So he’s still doing paperwork and attending meetings and tapping his foot impatiently while he suffers through it all. (Once, he’s so bored he even wonders if he still wants to be Hokage, and then he nearly throws up when he realizes what he just thought.)

But finally, _finally,_ Kakashi says “I’ve got a mission for you,” and partners him up with Shikamaru (“Troublesome...”) and Kiba (“Finally! I never get missions anymore. And Akamaru’s gotten too lazy to chase butterflies!”)

They each get mission scrolls. It’s a B-rank mission to the southern continent, which is enough of a trip that it’ll take at least two weeks, maybe three if they run into trouble. Naruto doesn’t even care that Shikamaru is team leader because he’s too stoked about getting out of Konoha for a little while. Plus Naruto is still technically a genin, even though Kakashi promises there’s a war promotion in the works for him somewhere down the line.

They leave tomorrow afternoon, and Kakashi takes one look at Naruto, vibrating with excitement where he stands, and sends him home early for the day.

Naruto’s too distracted by the idea of a mission to think clearly, which is why it takes him so long to realize what else this means. But once he does, he can’t stop grinning, and he brings it up the second he can.

“Hey _,_ so I’m leaving on a mission tomorrow,” Naruto says, and two pairs of eyes roam up to stare at him flatly.

“Yes, you already told us,” Sakura says slowly, because Naruto had—many times, with increasing volume and excitement.

“Sooooo,” he draws out the word, leaning forward over the back of a chair and peering owlishly at his teammates. “You know what that means.”

Sasuke sighs and puts down his pen, momentarily leaving the paperwork abandoned. “I’ll finally have a moment of peace?”

Naruto huffs, annoyed that they’re taking this long to figure it out. “I’m gonna be gone for over two weeks.”

“So I’ll get _two weeks_ of peace?” Sasuke bites back impatiently.

Naruto sticks his tongue out at Sasuke. He totally underestimates Sakura’s ability to annoy him. (Not that Sakura is annoying, but where Naruto annoys Sasuke on purpose, Sakura annoys Sasuke just by being herself, since girls are complicated and Sasuke is annoyed by _everything_.)

“Naruto, I’m sure you’ll be fine. Sorry, but I’ve gotta head to the hospital. My shift starts soon.” And then Sakura stands and sweeps out of the room, leaving Sasuke sitting at the table sipping coffee and Naruto leaning over the chair back, pouting in her wake.

“That’s not what I...meant,” he finishes, after she’s already left. Sasuke just waves an annoyed hand at Naruto, telling him to shoo, and goes back to filling out the paper in front of him.

Seriously, his lovers are really dense. They’d never be able to do anything without him around.

Naruto lets it drop, because if neither of them are gonna listen to what he has to say then they can just be stupid and suffer for two weeks while Naruto’s away. And he definitely intends to keep not saying anything until after he leaves, because it would serve them right, but—

But Naruto really, _really_ wants to hear about all the sex afterwards. And he’s not gonna get to if they don’t actually have sex while he’s gone. He really likes sex. A lot. Having sex, thinking about sex, hearing about sex even if he’s not participating in the sex. He likes sex. So he can’t really help himself. He’s rushing out the door to meet Kiba and Shikamaru at the front gate and he calls back over his shoulder, “Bye! Save a couple orgasms for me!”

He hears the distant sound of something shattering and snickers all the way to the front gate.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> too tired for notes. have this thing. be happy. live long and prosper, etc.

 

Sakura doesn’t know why she’s so shocked by Naruto’s little salutation.

It’d been a couple months ago when Sasuke had given her and Naruto ‘permission’—of a sort—to do whatever they pleased while he was gone. Of course it’d be the same the other way around. But where Naruto seems to need sex—or really just connection, someone to snuggle with and make happy—Sasuke is aloof and independent. He doesn’t seem to need anything. Actually, he seems rather like he only sticks around out of convenience. She knows it’s not true—he cares for them both, he has to—but he’s not the same as Naruto.

Plus her and Sasuke... Well, she doesn’t really know how she feels about that. On the one hand, it’s like her girlhood dream coming to fruition, but on the other hand, she’d tried to kill Sasuke with her own hands. There are days where she kind of still wants to kill him, though they’re less and less the more time goes by.

Sasuke doesn’t seem to act any differently since Naruto left, which serves to infuriate her more. If he doesn’t want her then fine, why should she give a damn about him? Just because Naruto assented to it doesn’t mean it has to happen. She certainly doesn’t want to force Sasuke into sex when it’s clear he’s not interested in her. It’s not as if she’d even _enjoy_ having sex with someone who so very clearly doesn’t want or need her.

She concentrates on her work at the hospital, and there’s a part of her that keeps wishing Sasuke will get a mission with ANBU outside of the village so she doesn’t even have to deal with him at all. As it is, some of the hospital staff have started wondering if she’s just sleeping there, since she’s hardly left the last three days. She seems to have a bit of a tendency to use the hospital to run away from her problems, but so far it hasn’t harmed her by doing so.

Someone calls in for backup by the afternoon of the fourth day, and Ino comes marching in to cheerily drag Sakura by the arm out of the hospital, to a new soba place that’s gone up in the Western district. Sakura doesn’t really mind. Ino has enough of her own problems that it should be easy to spend the entirety of lunch letting her whine and moan without ever bringing up what’s got Sakura working herself into the ground again.

“And he’s so _needy,_ ” Ino sighs and gives a little pout, twirling the straw around in her drink—something fruity and probably alcoholic, since she’s supposed to be dealing with clan things after this, which is not for the faint of heart—or the sober. “He just follows me around all damn day. I’d almost think it’s cute, except for how I know he’s got a girlfriend and he doesn’t follow _her_ around like that.”

Sakura frowns. “Wait, you’re dating who now?” she asks, and pointedly doesn’t mention the ‘girlfriend’ part, since it wouldn’t be the first time Ino’s gone out with someone who’s already involved with someone else. (Sakura refrains from disapproval of anything to do with Ino’s dating life these days, since she’s hardly above reproach herself, given her two boyfriends.)

Ino whimpers and sinks her chin down onto her palm, pouting. “That’s just it! I’m not even dating him and he still does that! It’s like he thinks he’s gonna learn to read minds through _osmosis_. I can’t teach him my family techniques and he’s never gonna learn the division by hiding in my shadow all day.”

Sakura can’t help but smile and hold back a laugh. “What, you’re not in the market for your own apprentice?” Sakura’s actually being pressured into taking on her own apprentice already. With Tsunade spending more and more time outside the village drinking and gambling as she does, Shizune and Tonton trailing in her wake, Sakura’s become the best medic-nin in Konoha. She’s got a whole lot of knowledge and a lot of genin squabbling to learn from the best. She might as well impart some of it, see if she can’t take some of the pressure off her own shoulders.

“I don’t have _time_ for an apprentice. I don’t even have time to _date!”_

Wow, this is serious.

Ino waves her free hand around in exasperation.

“Ever since the peace treaty, half our missions have been outside of the Union, to countries we’ve got next to no intelligence on. Ishi refuses entry to any Union nin, so that’s a giant question mark. We’ve got hidden villages popping up from countries we thought were civilian, the Northern islands are apparently _inhabited,_ and as far as our intelligence is concerned, the century-long war in the Southern continent started because someone _really liked cats.”_

Sakura pauses. “Cats?”

Ino groans and drops her head onto the table with a thump, her hair flying after. Sakura flicks a strand away from the grill before she adds baldness to her endless list of all that is wrong with the world.

“Naruto’s out on a mission to the Southern continent, I think,” Sakura says lightly. She’s not entirely sure that’s true, but Naruto had mentioned something about bringing a swimsuit, and she doubts he’d need one of those if he were headed North, or West into the deserts.

Ino lifts her head with another groan.

“Great, maybe he can send a horde of shadow clones to sweep the place. We don’t even know how many countries are down there now. Our most recent information barely even mentioned the war, it was _that old._ ” Ino huffs out a breath, and then seems to remember she’s got something fruity and alcoholic in front of her. She slurps it up through the straw in a few massive gulps.

“Shika’s so lucky his mom’s a ninja,” Ino says mournfully, “I wish my mom could take over the clan for a little bit while I get the Intelligence Division in order. And maybe find a boyfriend.”

Sakura can’t help but laugh a little, and she reaches across the table to pat Ino’s shoulder and says “There, there. I’m sure you’ll be back to terrorizing Konoha’s male population soon enough.”

Ino is still pouting, but she also shoots Sakura a half-hearted glare. Then she straightens up and leans back in her seat, eyes glinting. “Speaking of the male population, how are the two boys you’ve managed to steal away from me? You said Naruto’s on a mission? Is that where Shika went, too?”

“I think so,” Sakura replies, sipping at her own drink and refusing another when the server comes by to fetch another fruity contraption for Ino. “Naruto was getting restless doing all Kaka-sensei’s paperwork for him.”

Ino groans. “Oh no, is the village gonna fall apart while he’s gone?”

Sakura laughs. “Probably.” She trusts Kakashi, she just doesn’t trust him as Hokage. He’s pretty much had Naruto doing everything for him since he took office. He’s taken to being ‘filler-kage’ quite well, since it involves a lot less work than being an actual kage (a position he supposedly refused multiple times.)

“Did Sasuke burst into tears of joy when Naruto left?” Ino asks, leaning forward with a knowing smirk.

“Close enough. The house is really quiet now, it’s weird.” She scrunches up her nose, not entirely sure if she likes the change. It’s a little _too_ quiet. Plus she’s kind of avoiding Sasuke right now. Just a little bit.

“Mou, Sakura, you’re so lucky. Your boyfriend leaves on a mission and you’ve got a spare to sex up in the mean time. Maybe I should start looking for more than one boyfriend.”

Sakura can feel her face heating, and she ducks her head, a little embarrassed. But she’s always been pretty candid with Ino, especially about her relationship since Ino’s the one friend she knows is gonna have her back against anyone that doesn’t get it. “It doesn’t—I mean, it’s not really...like that...”

“Not like what?” Ino asks, giving Sakura a blank stare.

“With Naruto gone,” she presses on, “We don’t really—”

 _“What?”_ Ino shrieks, and Sakura winces as a couple other diners glance over. “You guys don’t go twosies sometimes?”

“No, no,” Sakura says, “We do! Well, Naruto and I do, when Sasuke’s gone, but Naruto hasn’t left the village much since we started this whole thing, so Sasuke and I never really... I don’t think he’s interested.”

Ino bursts out laughing, loud and brash, and Sakura leans forward with her eyebrows drawn low, trying to shush her before she draws any more attention to Sakura’s situation. “Sakura, _honey,”_ Ino says, “This is Sasuke. You guys are like destiny.”

“I thought you and Sasuke were destiny,” Sakura teases, but Ino doesn’t take the bait, just flaps a hand dismissively.

“That was before he went psycho and tried to destroy Konoha.” If Sakura didn’t know her so well, she would take insult to the slight against her moral character, but Ino doesn’t mean it like that. “Sakura, he’s probably dying to get some from you, especially with Naruto gone.”

Sakura frowns. “He loves Naruto—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ino cuts her off, “I’m sure he does, but he also kind of hates Naruto, too. He’s not gonna pass up the chance to have a little fun without him. Besides, he can taunt Naruto with it later. Trust me, he’s interested.”

“Well he doesn’t act like it.”

Ino just shrugs. “Guys are weird like that. Make a _tiny_ bit of effort—a little make-up, a nice dress, some sultry lines—and he’ll be begging for it.”

Sakura laughs it off at the time, because what the hell does Ino know? The number of second dates she’s been on could probably be counted on one hand, so Sakura isn’t exactly going to take her advice on this. But she starts to change her mind when she comes home to the eerily quiet, still a little empty house, and Sasuke barely even acknowledges her presence. He just keeps sitting, reading something complicated and thick, and completely ignores Sakura’s presence but for a quick nod when she walks in.

Sakura purses her lips to keep from stomping off angrily, and by the time she makes it upstairs (walking normally, no stomping or door-slamming involved) she’s already considering Ino’s suggestion.

And really, it’s not the worst suggestion after all. It’s almost like a bit of a game, to see how long she has to tease Sasuke before he takes notice. Maybe she’ll finally be able to prove there’s blood and not ice running through his veins. She should do it for the medical community, at the least.

She starts immediately, stripping down to her underwear, and then digging through her drawers for that ridiculous, lacy lingerie set Ino convinced her to shell out for a couple winters ago. It’s still pretty conservative, as lingerie goes, but she blushes furiously when she slips into it and looks herself over in the mirror. She’s come to learn that she has the ability to be as sexy as Ino if she puts her mind to it, but she’s never going to master the effortlessness Ino seems to possess. This will suit her just fine, though.

She nods to herself in the mirror and then pads back downstairs, forcing herself to walk at a completely normal, casual pace as she passes by where Sasuke’s sitting and heads for the kitchen to make herself some tea before bed. She doesn’t even let herself look to see if Sasuke notices, just beelines for the kitchen and keeps her chakra completely level, like she’s bored.

Sasuke doesn’t come and pounce on her while she’s in the kitchen, but she hadn’t expected him to. She makes herself a cup of tea, flips the lights off as she leaves, and holds the steaming mug between her hands while she walks carefully toward the stairs.

This time she does notice Sasuke. He stops reading for just a moment to glance up at her, and she can see a hint of confusion on his face, but she doesn’t acknowledge it, just walks straight on toward and up the stairs, focused on keeping her tea from spilling.

She sits in bed and sips her tea slowly, thankful that this lingerie is actually incredibly comfortable. For all Sasuke (or either of her boys) knows about women, she could’ve worn this to work today and simply come home, stripped down, and gone to bed. Which is actually what she plans to do, since changing now would tip Sasuke off to this being—well, to it being something, which she’s trying not to do. So instead she finishes her tea and slips right underneath the covers.

She’s in Sasuke’s room, technically, which has really become ‘their’ room more than his. He has the biggest bed, and even though they all have their own rooms and their own beds (Naruto’s down the hall and to the left, Sakura’s across the hall and with her own bathroom) they figured out, shortly after they started this, that they prefer to sleep close to each other.

She falls asleep before Sasuke comes to bed, but she wakes briefly as he slips in, on the opposite side. (Naruto tends to sleep in the middle, because no matter where he starts out, he always winds up with some part of his body touching both of them, so it’s easier to shove him in the middle and let him cuddle to his heart’s content.)

But she smiles when Sasuke slides over to her side, just far enough that their shoulders touch, like it’s unintentional even though she knows it’s not.

They don’t do anything more, and Sasuke doesn’t ravage her right there and then, but she’s starting to see the appeal of this little game. This could be fun.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t think much about it until she spends a couple of hours with Lee while he’s in town. He talks for a good half hour about Suna and how he’s doing as ambassador, and then ropes Sakura into a training session. But it feels good to stretch her muscles and practice her taijutsu and ninjutsu, since most of her efforts lately have been focused on medical jutsu.

She returns home sweaty and worn out, wanting nothing but a hot shower and a couple hours off her feet. Lee is...well, he’s Lee. He’s currently walking around Konoha on his hands, even though it’s well past dinnertime and getting chilly and she has plans to be in bed before long.

And this wasn’t part of the plan with Sasuke. This was training with an old friend and _not_ thinking about the plan, which is why she blushes the second she walks into the house and Sasuke looks right at her. She feels disgusting and probably smells just as bad, but Sasuke is...weird about it. It’s subtle, of course, because Sasuke always is. He just arches an eyebrow in question and she shrugs and looks away and says “I was training with Lee.”

Sasuke shifts in his seat. He looks distracted. By _her,_ even though she’s a bit of a mess, and it throws her for a loop for a good twenty seconds until she can duck into the kitchen for some tea to take into the shower with her, away from his gaze.

He _likes_ this. Sasuke likes power, and strength, and dedication to achieving those. He’s a fighter.

Sakura had always figured that was Naruto’s role to fill, because of their stupid rivalry, and she’d been happy to let him have it because no matter how long or hard she trained, she was never going to be at their level. She’s accepted that, because she’s good at other things, and Naruto could spend the rest of his life trying to learn to heal and never manage to even revive a fish, and Sakura has had her hand inside his chest cavity, keeping his heart beating, and that was her role.

But Naruto is on an entirely different continent at the moment, and Sasuke is here, seeing her come back from a training session that pushed her limits, and she can’t fight the pleased blush off her cheeks. When Ino suggested she tease him a little bit, she probably wasn’t thinking of this, but it’s working nonetheless and it’s good. She bites her lip over a smile and tosses a teabag into the boiling water.

Just because Sasuke likes what he sees doesn’t mean she’s going to stay like this, though, because she swears she can feel an entire layer of grime settling on her skin. But she does make a point of walking a little slower, like her limbs are heavy from fatigue (which isn’t really a reach, since they actually are.) She even wipes her forehead with the back of her hand before she climbs the stairs.

 _Damn right, Sasuke!_ she thinks, _I may be your girlfriend but I’m a kunoichi first. It’s about time you noticed._

Sakura doesn’t bother tamping down the grin on her face as she heads toward the shower.

 

* * *

 

The defining characteristic of shinobi in this village is that they appear to forget the other people they associate with on a daily basis are also shinobi. Sasuke knows what Sakura is doing. Undoubtedly it’s Ino’s influence. Sasuke lost her interest years ago, but he has never been fully rid of her or her, with her continuing sway over Sakura.

He doesn’t understand the purpose of playing a cat and mouse game. The extremely uncomfortable conversation they’d had when Sasuke started taking missions outside the village was supposed to have definitively addressed this. But Sakura has a long and storied history of affecting her behavior in deference to Ino, and she apparently hasn’t grown out of it yet.

Sasuke doesn’t particularly care how this plays out. If Sakura is content to do these unnecessary things anyway, then Sasuke will let her believe it affects him.

He won’t tolerate Sakura becoming as shortsighted as she’d been at 12, but from what he knows about her growth in the interim, she wouldn’t allow that either. She’s matured the most of the team, though she tends to equate maturity with how many people you can affect with a single jutsu. A byproduct of being grouped with himself and Naruto; they’re both exceptionally mature fighters, but fell far short of emotional adulthood when their immediate reaction to disagreement resulted in both of them losing an arm, and nearly their lives.

Whatever game Sakura’s playing at Ino’s behest seems to have been forgotten for the moment, however. There’d been an influx of teams coming back from missions on the Southern continent. Only one of each had reported immediately to Kakashi, and with how many had shown up bleeding and dirty, he had rightly assumed the other members of the team were taking up space in the hospital. Sakura comes home in a flurry, a flush to her cheeks and mind whirring behind her eyes so quickly she appears to be assessing the medical condition of the pork in her meal.

Sasuke watches her stare intently at her plate, until her eyes are glazed over and her food is cold, before he says “The war on the Southern continent is escalating.”

Sakura hums in assent, still focused somewhere else, before she lets out a sigh and leans back, abandoning her chopsticks and dinner entirely.

“It’s not getting any better,” she says in a detached voice, betrayed only by the hardness in her eyes. “We had a buffer before, when we were waging our own wars and there was nothing to be gained from coming here if they were just as likely to be killed. But the chatter at the hospital today— Their trade routes have been destroyed by the raids in the North, and suddenly the Union is the only stable supply for medicines and weapons. It’s contained to the coastline for the moment, but it’s having enough of an impact that we’re sending half our shinobi into the middle of the war just for scraps of intel...” She drifts off with a frown, staring absently. Naruto is there right now, gathering intel, though how anyone could expect that moron to be able to do such a thing is beyond him. Regardless, Sakura has been worried. She doesn’t need to be. Naruto is too stupid to die, and moreover he’s too strong to be brought down by two-bit shinobi from the war-torn hidden villages of the Southern continent.

Sasuke, for all he may be confined to the village while not on an official mission, hears more than enough standing guard for Kakashi and listening at the few council meetings the rest of the council hadn’t been able to exclude him from so far. In the dying embers of their own war, the war in the South had flared to life. Even the civilian residents of Konoha had felt the shifting winds in the wake of their own war, sheltered as they were by stretches of forest and the protection of the strongest hidden village in the Union.

It didn’t matter to the Southern shinobi that their war was pointless and un-winnable. They had already suffered loss. They were driven by revenge, and Sasuke can attest to just how strong a motivator that was. They may not have the strength or mental wherewithal to actualize a strategized attack, certainly not one good enough to kill Naruto or outwit Shikamaru, but they’re more than capable of causing pointless chaos. As long as they don’t organize in the next couple weeks, there’s no reason for Sakura to fret, so he decides not to mention Naruto. He’d be fine, unfortunately.

“It’s not going to improve,” Sasuke says, “The Union created a power imbalance.”

Sakura stands, looking restless, and gathers their dishes to take to the kitchen, hers still mostly untouched. “That’s what I’m worried about. The Union is stable, but the Southern continent hasn’t been for decades.”

“They’re low on resources. The Union’s not,” Sasuke says with a shrug, rising to follow her. “They’re going to come looking, regardless of the council’s delusions of everlasting peace and prosperity.”

Sakura huffs in annoyance, tossing the dishes into the sink with a loud clatter. “The council should pull their heads out of their asses.”

Sasuke grins. Naruto may still be living in the clouds, but Sakura lives in reality with the rest of them. It’s something he’s always appreciated about her. She’s just as sharp as Sasuke in political affairs, but she has a compassion for human life that he’s never been able to grasp. She’d make a brilliant councilor. Certainly better than the blithering idiots at least half of them are, still clinging feebly to the vestiges of the past wars, unswayable in their conviction that the Union was the be-all-end-all of peace for all mankind. They’re making the same mistake the Uchiha had made: confusing alliance with invincibility.

His grin darkens. The council would have to adapt, or else they too would fall to the greater machinations of shinobi.

With a single brush of his fingertips against her shoulder, he says “I agree.”

Sasuke wonders if Ino’s crash course in seduction touched on displays of intelligence. If it hadn’t, it’s severely lacking.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lemme know how I do. Got stuck forever on this one trying to figure out the dynamics and I'm still not entirely sure I've got it. But fuckityolo.

_Okay, enough of this shit._

Sakura isn’t Ino. Ino likes the flirting and the teasing and the leading men on and the endless cat and mouse game. She plays with her food before she eats it. For Ino, the foreplay to the actual foreplay is just as good as the sex.

But Sakura has a short temper and she’s impatient. The flirting is fine, it’s great, but _damn it,_ it’s been a week and she doesn’t see the point of waiting until Sasuke makes a move. Ino said he wanted it, and she’s seen enough herself to back that up, and she’s pretty sure if she strips down and sits on his face, it’s gonna go exactly how she wants it to, so she’s not going to wait for some grand invitation.

She also pulled back-to-back doubles at the hospital this week, had two genins vomit all over her—meaning two rushed, half-cold showers—had her eyebrows nearly singed off by a genjutsu-disoriented jounin with a fire affinity, and really wants someone to fuck her into the floor before she has to go back to the hospital. Naruto isn’t here, so Sasuke is just going to have to take one for the team.

He’s due home in an hour, assuming his border detail doesn’t run over, which if it does, she’ll just have to take care of it herself. And probably be pissy about it for a little while, because she has needs.

So she strips down to her panties and bra, turns the heat up enough so she won’t be cold, and settles down onto the couch in the main room with a book and a hot cup of tea. Barely five minutes later, before she’s had a chance to sip her tea and before she’s gotten flustered and convinced herself out of this crazy plan, the seals on the door hiss as they deactivate and Sasuke walks in.

She puts her book down to the side, stands facing Sasuke with her hands on her hips and her skin on display, and says “Hello, Sasuke.”

Sasuke looks at her, his eyebrows go up, and he wipes any trace of emotion from his features before he replies with a short, almost inquisitive “Hi.”

He probably thinks this is another one of her teases. She’s starting to think maybe Sasuke knows about her conversation with Ino, or at least the idea of it, because her actions as of late haven’t exactly been like her. But this time she’s serious. This is her—none of Ino’s seduction techniques, no cat and mouse game—just her.

Alright, then. Before she loses her nerve. “I want you to hold me down and fuck me.”

Nothing about Sasuke’s expression or posture changes. He’s too good a ninja to let anything show when he doesn’t want it to. It makes him hard to read, and it makes it nearly impossible for her to figure out what he’s thinking when he hums again, puts his gear to the side, and walks into the kitchen.

_Boys._

She’s in this now, though, and she won’t back down from a challenge, so she follows him. He’s filling a glass of water and bites into an apple from the bowl on the counter, barely acknowledging her presence. Despite herself, she does start worrying. What if Ino completely misread the situation? What if she’s just shattered Sasuke’s opinion of her by admitting this weakness—because he would view this as a weakness. He seems to be perfectly fine by himself when her and Naruto aren’t around. Sakura’s never wondered if he had someone else—besides the fact that he’s too loyal to cheat, no one in the village would be willing to fool around with the traitor.

That’s a vicious thought, but true nonetheless.

But maybe he really doesn’t want this. Maybe he’s only in it for something else, some self-centered attempt to get his standing in Konoha back to a more favorable position. He knows that Sakura and Naruto would never betray him to the village, not even if they knew he didn’t care about them. Naruto would take it as a challenge to change his mind, and Sakura has loved him too long not to accept whatever she can get, even if it’s not what she wants.

“Sasuke, I—”

It’s too fast for even her to see. He drops the apple and has her pinned against the fridge by her arms, closing in around her and close enough to kill. Her breath catches.

“Do you?” he asks, his voice low and dangerous.

She’s still not sure which way this is going to go, and half of her thinks she’s about to die, but a pleased shiver still manages to shoot down her spine, settling in her lower abdomen with a deep, rumbling buzz.

“What?” she asks on a breath.

“Are you certain that’s what you want?”

She doesn’t know. She thought she did, thought she knew exactly how this would play out, only now Sasuke is scaring her and turning her on at the same time, and her mind is a mess. She feels as if she’s about to start blubbering like a child, and bites her lip to hold it back.

She fails to notice how that gesture must look to him until he takes it as an invitation, pressing forward with his whole body until their hips are slotted together painfully, and she can feel his erection pressing into her skin through their clothing.

Her will returns.

_“Yes.”_

Sasuke grins—a sharp, predatory thing—and his fingers tighten around her arms, pressing. She barely has time to react before Sasuke is using his grip around her arms to flip her— _fast—_ and slam her against the floor so hard the breath leaves her lungs.

_Oh yeah._

He’s covering her in seconds, knees bracketing her hips, hands still gripping her arms tightly. She’d meant the “hold me down and fuck me” part more in a metaphorical sense, but now that she’s here it’s all she can think about. Sasuke looks dangerous— _is_ dangerous—and that is apparently what she wants from him.

His hair is long enough now that he’d tied the bulk of it back, but loose strands that escaped are hanging in front of his face as he looks at her, contemplating. She’s a little pissed he doesn’t look more turned on right now, but then he’s the tactical one. He’s never going to be the overeager puppy Naruto is about sex, and Sakura wouldn’t want him to be. She wants this—wants to find out what they can be together.

Sasuke must make his decision, because all at once he’s leaning down and kissing her hard, swallowing her gasp. She presses everything she has up, her lips against his, her arms straining against his grip, her back arching until his shirt tickles the bare skin of her stomach. She can’t go anywhere without getting chakra involved, but she’s more interested in what’s happening right here.

He tears away from her mouth, moving his lips around her jaw and down to her neck, nipping at her skin. She turns her head to the side and stretches to give him room, to say _more, please, more_ but he doesn’t linger. His hands loosen around her arms to slide over her shoulders, and then he’s pulling her bra off by the straps until it slides off her breasts and winds up twisted around her middle, her elbows still looped through the straps.

Sasuke doesn’t seem to care, just keeps kissing and biting down her chest. She brings her hands up to grab for his hair, pulling chunks of it from the tie until it’s mostly loose, but she doesn’t get very far. Sasuke pulls away to grab at her wrists, catching them right near his ears. He looks up at her through the dark pieces of his hair and says “No.”

Then he pulls her arms down by the wrists and wedges them beneath her lower back, like they’re tied together behind her. She can feel her shoulders straining, the bumps of her spine press her wrists into the floor, and dizziness crashes over her in waves because _oh._

“Stay,” Sasuke says as he moves his head back down toward her chest. “Should use that bra to tie you up,” he adds in a low voice, right before his mouth closes around her nipple and she whines. Her eyes shut tight as Sasuke swirls his tongue and teases with his teeth. His hands have moved to keep her hips pressed to the ground, her hands trapped against the unforgiving weight.

Sasuke barely grazes over her other breast before he starts back down, ghosting over her ribs and her stomach, resting his weight against her knees now. She can feel every place his mouth has been, the air cooler as it chills her skin, and when Sasuke finally pulls his mouth away from the spot just beneath her navel, she has to twist her head up to look.

He tilts his head up to meet her eyes and grins sharply, the kind of grin he gets when he’s about to put a hole in someone’s chest.

Her entire body shudders.

She doesn’t look away. Sasuke tilts down, holding her hips in place as he bites gently, right over her clit, through the fabric of her panties. Sakura sucks in a gasp as a jolt of pleasure runs through her, slamming her head back against the floor and silently begging for more. It’s not exactly what she asked for, but she’ll take it, she’ll take it, any of it.

But then Sasuke hooks his fingers around her panties, dragging them down, moving with the motion until they’re off. She can’t feel any part of Sasuke right now, for a little while, and Sasuke wouldn’t leave her here like this, wouldn’t take her near the edge and not push her over, but she still has to lift her head again to check.

Just as she does, sees Sasuke kneeling at her feet, he grabs her by the ankles and _pulls._ She yelps, her bare skin dragging against the floor and her arms twisting up behind her until they really are tied up by the straps of her bra, pressed against the middle of her back at an uncomfortable angle. She doesn’t give a shit. Sasuke just _dragged her_ to him, grinning dangerously like he knows exactly what he’s doing, pulling at her knees until they’re both bent, Sasuke kneeling between them and—still dressed.

Her head is spinning, but something about that gives her a moment of lucidity, because she snorts and says “Are you planning to fuck me through a couple layers of cotton?”

Sasuke blinks, looks down at himself, then narrows his eyes at her. She’s grinning, and she shakes her hips a little against the floor, begging him to try. It’s probably pretty uncomfortable in his pants right now. Fair trade, for the way Sakura’s shoulders are going to ache tomorrow.

“Don’t move,” Sasuke growls as he stands in one fluid motion and turns to leave the room, pulling at his clothing as he does. Sakura starts to shift a little, try to take the pressure off her shoulders and arms, maybe get untangled from her own damn bra, but suddenly she’s being slammed back into the ground so hard she swears she hears cracking, and Sasuke’s mouth is hovering just in front of her face. _“Don’t. Move.”_

Then he gives her a biting kiss and pulls away again, leaving her twisted and panting on the ground, so turned on she couldn’t move if she wanted to.

She’s never seen Sasuke like this. Not in the bedroom—or the kitchen. He’s been like this on the battlefield, all quick movements and forceful strikes. But he’s always been gentle when it was all three of them. She thinks he can be gentle with just her, too, but that’s not what she’d asked for. Not this time. Not when she’s desperate and keening to see how this plays out.

She can feel her cunt leaking, enough to be ticklish, but she doesn’t move at all. Doesn’t even shift. She stays perfectly still, like she’s been trained to, her breaths slowing from pants into barely-there puffs of air. She’d love to see what Sasuke would do to her if she were up and walking around when he got back. But she wants to see what he’ll do to her like this, too.

She wants to try this with him a hundred different times. And when Naruto gets back, she wants to see if she can draw out this side of him with him there. Because Naruto wouldn’t react the same way. He’d fight against it, fight against Sasuke like he always does, and Sasuke wouldn’t give in too easily. She wants to see them tear each other apart.

Just not literally. She’s already seen that. Seen too many damn years of it. She wants to paint over the memories with something better.

And she wants Sasuke back in here, right now, because her arousal is wearing thin and she’s starting to lose feeling in her arms.

“Hn.”

Before she can move to look, he’s suddenly right there over her, his hips pressing down against hers and his hands slamming into the floor on either side of her head. Her breath cuts off in a stutter. He covers her mouth in a kiss, fast and pressing, tongue pushing in and sliding along the roof of her mouth. She kisses back, since kissing is just about the only way she can do anything, with her arms twisted up and his hips locking her in.

Suddenly his fingers brush her thigh, then drag against her clit hard enough that she blanks for a second, gasping out of the kiss. He slides his fingers down to curve inside of her and his thumb rubs circles around her clit, and it’s enough to have her draw her knees in until they’re pressing against Sasuke’s sides.

He fucks her fast, fingers slipping in and out and pressing inside, dragging out and up until her clit is soaked and everything is slippery. His mouth moves down to her neck because she can’t stop gasping for air, biting and pulling at the skin there. She tries to slam her hips upward but he doesn’t let her, his hips still pressed down against her so unrelentingly that there are sparks of dull pain from where their hipbones meet. His hand is trapped between them and moving, and she can’t take this, wants more but doesn’t want it to stop.

She turns her head to the side, whining in the back of her throat. “Sasuke.”

He stops abruptly, sliding his fingers out of her, and no no _no,_ she was so close, all her muscles tensing and relaxing and tensing and so close to just letting go, and now he’s pulling back and what the hell? What sort of boyfriend is he, to leave her here like this just because she said his name. _Why the fuck—_

Strong hands grab her thighs as Sasuke pushes in, and _oh thank the gods._ Her hips tilt up to take him, and she tries to get leverage with her arms like this, her shoulders anchoring on the ground as she arcs up.

His forehead thumps down against her chest, just above her breast as he shoves all the way in and just holds there, breathing. She’s half out of her mind right now, but it’s dizzying to think maybe he is too. Sasuke so rarely takes a moment like this. Before they’d gotten him back, it seemed like he was always moving, always fighting or planning how to fight, trying to stay six steps ahead.

Now, he’s right here and now, and he starts to move, quick little thrusts at first before he lets go, his cock slamming into her she can feel quick bursts of pain that swept up in the pleasure. She’s desperate to reach up and grab something, her fingers clenching uselessly at her back. She twists her spine, pulling each shoulder off the ground as she tries to writhe herself to freedom, but then Sasuke’s arm slams down against her collarbone.

He doesn’t even stop. Just holds her shoulders down and fucks into her, his other hand grabbing at her thigh to pry her open.

“Fuck,” she rasps, “fuck, _please,_ Sas—”

She rocks against the floor with every thrust, and her legs try to close in around Sasuke but he holds her open, holds her down hard enough to bruise. Her mind is buzzing, Sasuke plunging into her and sliding out, over and over with barely time to breathe between.

He drops down to bite at her jaw and slide their mouths together, pushing her legs wider until she’s shaking and her skin is tingling.

“Sakura,” he breathes against her jaw.

She keens and comes, thighs locking down and her whole body tensing around him in uneven waves. Sasuke keeps moving, the bursts of pleasure rolling into her orgasm until she can’t hear anything but the blood rushing in her ears, her hands pulling from where they’re tied behind her back.

He fucks her through it, slowing but not stopping, waits until she’s just starting to come down before he huffs out a breath, braces forward, his hand still laid out against her chest, and slams inside fast. Again and again and again and she shakes with it, groaning and begging because it’s too much, so much rushing straight at her without time to pause, just building up again until she’s teetering near the edge again in seconds.

She holds it back, can’t feel anything but Sasuke, his skin sweat-slicked and hot and sliding against hers, his breaths sharp and wet at her neck, just below her ear. His arm, heavy on her chest and keeping her arms trapped. She keeps holding until she can’t anymore, until one of them has to give, and like hell it’s gonna be her when she’s half a minute from her last orgasm.

Sakura sucks in air, wills herself to spread her knees out wide and keeps them there, leaving herself wide open and clenching everything she can in concentrated waves as Sasuke thrusts into her. He leans down, speeds up until he’s uneven and erratic, gasping for air.

She tenses again, holding and holding and barely aware of herself.

Sasuke comes, still sliding inside of her desperately, his arm sliding against her chest, closer to her neck, and she finally lets herself tumble after, her mind ringing and her lungs burning.

She’s barely there, the next few minutes, floating in the haze of two orgasms that were closer together than she’d ever had, like twin waves crashing against shore. Sasuke has relaxed over her, spreading his weight and pulling out of her, just on the edge of pain. They both breathe. Her skin is already starting to feel cool and sticky.

Sasuke slides off her, his weight finally taking some of the strain off her arms, and she immediately rolls onto her side with a huff. She’s going to need to chakra-heal her shoulders, once she’s untangled and cleaned up. She doesn’t care.

Sasuke hums quietly, and his fingers skitter over the side of her breast before he palms her side, using his other arm to bring her upright with him, turning her gently until he can get to her back. He’s exceedingly gentle, considering how he was a few minutes ago, unwrapping the straps from their twisted mess around her arms and wrists. He releases the back and the bra falls away to the side, finally off. She brings her arms forward with a wince while her muscles beg her not to do that.

Sasuke pulls at her then, gentle but insistent, until she’s resting half on-top of him lying right there on the kitchen floor. His fingers, wrapped in smooth bandages that feel so different and odd from normal skin, trace out gentle patterns against her back, her shoulders, her arms. She relaxes into the touch, lets it flow together with the pins and needles that start up when the blood flow returns to her arms.

“Sorry,” he says after awhile, so quietly she wouldn’t have heard if her head weren’t pressed to his chest, right near his throat.

She huffs. “What for?” Her voice is quiet too, though mostly because she’s worn out and exhausted.

His fingers press just a little bit more firmly against her shoulder, and then take up their slow trace along her skin again. There is no way Sasuke is stupid enough to try to apologize for the amazing sex they just had. But then this is Sasuke.

She props herself up on her elbows, though it sends fire screaming up her arms, to look him in the eyes. “Let’s get something straight. I’m a shinobi. You boys might tend to forget this between all your chakra kittens and magic eyes, but I can take a beating. I can punch craters into the earth. They might not be as big as _your_ craters, but they’re still craters. You sure as shit won’t see me whining about _sore shoulders.”_ She narrows her eyes until it seems like Sasuke gets her point, though the only acknowledgment is a slow blink. “Good. Now stop screwing with my afterglow. Naruto does enough of that. You’re supposed to be the quiet one.” She tilts her arm up to pat his cheek, which shocks him appropriately, and then settles back down on his chest before her arms literally catch fire.

She closes her eyes, and Sasuke brings his fingers up to tentatively stroke over her back again, light and sweet. She feels exhaustion tugging at her mind, but she fights it back for just a moment longer because—

“I did not come home from a double at the hospital just to sleep on the kitchen floor.”

Sasuke’s hum sounds strikingly similar to a laugh. She grins, burying her face against his neck, and waits for him to realize he’s going to carry her up to bed.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You will notice this fic magically gained another chapter.
> 
> That is because I wrote this chapter yesterday.
> 
> I normally wait to post a fic until I've finished it because I don't like the pressure of writing under a deadline. But I realized, about a week before you lovely commenters also realized, that this scene needed to happen. The fic would be incomplete without it. So I wrote it. And here it is.
> 
> Good news is, I'm fairly confident that this story is well and truly complete now. Barring minor grammatical edits, everything else is written and ready for publication (I hope!)
> 
> Anyway, happy reading~!
> 
> .

Sasuke had been in one of Orochimaru's hideouts, a humid cave near the Eastern shore that served as a dumping ground for scrolls and texts Orochimaru had collected over the years—the only thing to pass the time with there—when he realized that Itachi and Shisui had been in love.

It hadn't mattered at the time. It doesn’t matter now. Shisui is long dead, Itachi had eventually followed, and despite all that had come to light during the war and Itachi’s final days, Sasuke isn’t foolish enough to think his brother’s love life would have had any effect on the eventual outcome of the war, or Sasuke’s life thereafter.

Sasuke had forgotten about Shisui altogether until this morning. This morning, he wakes from a dream he can’t grasp, watches Sakura’s soft, sleeping form streaked with early morning light, and has the abrupt realization that love cannot change destiny.

Sasuke rolls out of the bed so quickly that the frame bangs against the wall. Sakura startles awake, but Sasuke barely notices.

Itachi and Shisui had been in love. Shisui had still died. Itachi had still taken the blame for his death, for the massacre, and for all the acts Akatsuki had taken against Konoha and the jinchuriki. Itachi had still assumed the mantle of traitor and murderer. Sasuke had still killed him.

Fate.

“Sas?” Sakura asks sleepily, sitting up in the bed with the blankets pooled around her, blinking slowly.

Sasuke turns and walks out of the room.

If fate is incontrovertible then any action taken to alter its path is ultimately futile. What will be, will be. It had been Sasuke’s fate to kill his brother. Anything that occurred afterward was irrelevant because his fate had already been carried out.

And if Itachi’s fate had been to die as a traitor, then anything that happened before—any love Itachi and Shisui might have shared—and anything that happened after, all of it had been ineffective against the unrelenting march of fate.

Sakura, her footfalls soft beneath the pounding of blood in his ears, stumbles around the corner and calls after him. “Where are you going?”

If fate cannot be altered, then free will does not exist. If free will does not exist, then he is who he was always meant to be, and no amount of pretending or whatever this is will change the fact that Sasuke is an avenger.

“When will you be back?” Sakura asks, right behind him just as he’s stepping out the door.

He can feel it—emotion, weakness, a desperate grab for happiness—settling in his chest like frost, and he has been beholden to his own naiveté so long, he doesn’t know how to _not_ answer her.

“I won’t.”

 

* * *

 

Sakura hadn’t followed him. A blessing, perhaps, or the machinations of destiny. He slows his flash step to a civilian pace, finally far enough away from the village that he doubts anyone will be looking for him. He lost the ANBU tasked with ensuring his imprisonment in the village outside the confines of a mission a while back, the unexpected nature of his departure likely meaning there were fewer watching him to begin with.

There is a cold and heavy stone in his gut that he’s hoping to ignore long enough it simply disappears, though he attempted that with Naruto for years and it hadn’t seemed to work.

But it doesn’t matter. It has never mattered. He’s not altering his course, just hastening it in an attempt to mitigate the pain of years spent convincing himself he could have this when his life is steeped in blood.

That it hurts anyway is a sign he’s let himself slip further than he thought. Contentment is a disease to people like him, a slow and creeping sickness that permeates every aspect of his life until he believes he’s somehow earned it.

Sasuke doesn’t waste time on pointless endeavors. He is an avenger, a warrior, a loner, a traitor, a—

“Bastard!”

A streak of orange barrels into him bodily, knocking the breath from his lungs and slamming him through a tree. He gasps for air in a heap on the ground, and when he moves he can feel tiny splinters of wood prickling his skin, which would be much less of a problem if there weren’t another body writhing on top of him.

Sasuke shoves Naruto off of him so he can roll onto his side and catch his breath. In his periphery, Naruto scrambles to his feet and then leans down ridiculously low, squinting with his arms crossed over his chest.

“What the hell, bastard? I’m gone for two weeks and you decide to be all emo again? I thought you were s’posed to be all grown up and shit!”

Sasuke coughs and draws himself to his feet, nearly cracking his skull against Naruto’s on the way up. “You’re one to talk.”

Naruto takes a step forward. “You made Sakura cry.”

Sasuke snorts. Sakura, unlike the orange-clad moron standing in front of him, is _actually_ grown up. She wouldn’t cry over this.

Naruto narrows his eyes even more, and then pokes him in the chest, twice, like he’s checking to see if Sasuke is real. Then he leans back, crosses his arms again, and tilts his head to the side. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

Sasuke huffs out a breath and attempts to step around Naruto, which doesn’t work. The idiot is nothing if not persistent.

“I ascertained certain incontrovertible truths and decided to leave,” he tries.

Naruto frowns. “Stop using big words to confuse me, asshole. You were running. Again. Like a _coward.”_

Sasuke feels his temper flare, but Naruto’s uncanny ability to incite him is part of what got him into this mess in the first place.

“I’m an avenger, not a house pet.”

“I dunno, I’m the one with a giant cat sealed inside me so how come you’re the one being an antisocial bastard and throwing hissy fits?”

“I don’t have time for this,” Sasuke mutters before flash-stepping around Naruto, flying through the trees in the sole direction of _away._

“Damn it!” Naruto yells, following close behind him and gaining. Another one of Sasuke’s failings in the last year, if his training has slipped enough that Naruto can outrun him. All the more reason he needs to leave now, before he’s unrecognizable from who he’s supposed to be. Which is proving to be a problem when Naruto keeps slamming him through trees like an unruly wrecking ball.

“What the fuck?” Sasuke shouts, brushing a second layer of splinters off his clothes and standing, his shoulders set and his breathing barely held in check amidst the bubbling pit of rage overtaking him. Naruto is determined to make him suffer by the sheer force of his stupidity.

When Sasuke finally looks up at Naruto, an eerie kind of calmness has settled over him. Naruto’s expression is blank, almost like he’s a real shinobi. Of course, as soon as he opens his mouth that fantasy shatters.

“Hey, that’s my line. What the _fuck,_ Sasuke? Sakura and me spent _years_ trying to get you back, and then we spent a year trying to _keep_ you back, and now we’re here again and _what the fuck?_ What the fuck? How come you’re so dumb, huh? Why d’you keep trying so hard to mess everything up? Why can’t you just shut up and stop fighting all the damn time?”

Sasuke breaths out a derisive laugh. Naruto’s always been shit at grand speeches. “I’m a shinobi. I was born to fight.”

“Nuh-uh, you were born to be a little bitch too obsessed with yourself to understand what I mean when I tell you I love you.”

Love. “Hn.” Love is what caused this in the first place. Love is the enemy of a true ninja. “You’re a fucking moron.”

“I love you,” Naruto repeats, like it’s gonna mean anything if he says it again. Naruto is a child. He doesn’t know what love is.

“Whatever.”

Naruto’s affecting this resolute, serious expression, walking forward until they’re almost breathing the same air. “I love you.” Sasuke still doesn’t believe him.

“I don’t care, idiot.”

Naruto shrugs. “So what? I still love you.”

Sasuke pushes Naruto away from him, opening his mouth to finally just let loose, to rage and scream until Naruto gets the fuck out of his face.

Naruto shoves him into another tree. Against it, this time, not through—the trunk creaks but it doesn’t break. Then he grabs Sasuke by the wrist, his left, prosthetic clutching clumsily at prosthetic. “I love you. And if I gotta beat you into the ground again to prove it, I will.” Naruto nods his head to the side, but his eyes never leave Sasuke’s face. “The Valley’s right over there. You wanna rip these arms off again?”

Sasuke—falters.

Naruto leans even closer, until their noses are almost touching. “Do you?”

Sasuke doesn’t respond. Nothing has changed. Nothing Naruto’s said so far has affected him, except this, and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know how to fight it. So he just stares, thinking, trying to find words. It’s like trying to tame a hurricane. And it’s not working.

Then Naruto pulls back, releasing his wrist and walking backwards until Sasuke can’t feel the heat—fox chakra?—radiating from his skin anymore.

“Fine,” he says, and for a moment Sasuke almost believes he’s giving up, letting Sasuke walk away for good this time. “Sakura didn’t really cry, but she did break a bunch of furniture, and someone’s gotta go clean it up. When you decide you wanna stop being a dumbass, you know where we’ll be. Bastard.”

He flashes away in a streak of orange, faster than even Sasuke’s eyes can follow, and Sasuke stands perfectly still, listening as the ambient sounds of the forest drift back into his perception and he’s alone.

Sasuke looks to where Naruto had nodded. The Valley of the End. Had he really been headed toward—

He leans his weight against the tree and closes his eyes.

 

* * *

 

The single most annoying aspect of Sasuke’s personality is that he needs copious amounts of time to think. He can be impulsive, and he can make snap decisions during battle, but when he doesn’t have to he prefers to retreat until he can sort through his thoughts enough to understand them and know what to do next, or at least ignore anything he doesn’t want to think about until he stumbles into a plan by time alone.

The single most annoying aspect of Konoha is that it’s surrounded by miles and miles of dense, noisy, damp, and generally uncomfortable forest. He may be vindictive, but he’s usually not petty.

He tells himself that’s the only reason he goes back.

Sakura really had broken a lot of furniture. The moment he walks in, he sees a pile of broken chairs, a table, and the twisted remnants of a metal lamp piled haphazardly on top of the couch, which is sagging in the middle and probably cracked in the frame.

It’s quiet enough that there’s no way Naruto is still here. It’s been a few hours—he’s not sure exactly how many—so it’s possible Naruto took off after constructing this shitty monument to Sakura’s temper. He moves silently across the room, around the pile and toward the stairs to the bedrooms, where he fully intends to sleep, if only so he doesn’t have to think.

He honestly hadn’t thought Sakura would be here either. She had a tendency to take off after causing so much unnecessary destruction, in the hopes that whenever she returned, the evidence would be gone and she could pretend it had never happened. It’s a ridiculously immature thing to do, but he curbs his reproach. Is he in any place to speak on immaturity?

Apparently this time, Sakura decided to deviate from the norm.

“Sas—” she swallows halfway through his name, standing on the bottom step and staring at him. He still doesn’t have words, and can’t even begin to address Sakura when he’s still working through whatever loop Naruto threw him for. But he doesn’t need words, because the same eerie calmness washes over her features, like it transferred from Naruto right over to her, and she straightens her posture and says “I’m going to say something, and you’re going to shut up and listen.”

She takes the last step down and approaches him, but stops with a healthy distance between them. Sakura, for all she tries to hide it behind medical training and outbursts of violence, usually knows what she wants to say and exactly how she wants to say it. He’s not sure when he learned this about her, but he knows by now that it’s true. Which is why it shakes him when she wavers, starting and stopping half a dozen times without a single complete word spoken.

Finally she sighs, dipping her head, and says in a quiet voice, “You’re not a prisoner.”

He wants to refute that. It’s wrong. It’s always been wrong, since the massacre. He’s been a prisoner one way or another for the majority of his life, so who the hell does Sakura think she is to claim he’s not still?

“You’re not,” she continues, “I know with the council, with the village, sometimes it must feel like—”

Her fingers curl into a gentle fist at her side.

“But not with us. We love you. We want you to be happy.” She chances a look at him, just for a second, and then her eyes dart away. “If...if you ever need to leave, we won’t stop you.”

Sasuke can’t help it—he’s spent the better part of the last few hours speechless, but what Sakura’s saying is impossible. “Does Naruto know about that?”

Her eyes snap to meet his, and her lips are suddenly pressed into a thin, disapproving line. “It was his idea.”

Impossible.

“I was the apprehensive one, but Naruto swears you...” She shakes her head. “If you truly need to go, then we won’t stop you. With one condition.”

Of course. A condition. What she’s saying is impossible. Naruto would never agree to it, much less suggest it. There would have to be ridiculously extravagant stipulations, if not an all-out reversal. Once a prisoner, always a—

“Just come back.”

Sasuke stops. He meets her eyes.

“I can be days, weeks, months...years. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. But if you leave, just promise me you’ll come back. Even for a moment. You can leave. You can always leave. Just please don’t—” she swallows. Her composure is starting to seem shaky. “Just please don’t _leave.”_

Don’t leave _us._ Don’t leave Naruto and Sakura. Don’t leave them, because they love—

Gathering herself, Sakura closes the space between them to brush her lips against his cheek, like she has dozens of times, and then she keeps on walking, not saying another word, and the house—their house—is suddenly empty and silent, save for the whisper of his own breath.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short one, sorry :(
> 
> i'll try to post the next chapter sooner than a full week but no promises. my job is...if I told you about all the shit that happened with my job just this week i would probably get subpoenaed for breaking trade secrets or something. i'm just wiped every day. but hopefully turning the corner on that soon.
> 
> love you guys <3 keep being awesome. you are the brightest part of my day.

Sakura could kick herself for not noticing.

It’s just that she’s been treating two teams that returned from a mission in the West with a mysterious, slow-acting poison in their blood, _and_ she’s been playing peacekeeper with the boys because living under one roof is an “adjustment”, _and_ she’s been dragged into painfully awkward conversations with her parents about her current relationship status, which has somehow spread through the entire village.

She’s busy as hell. Which is why she doesn’t realize until the last possible second that Shizune and Tsunade have been gearing up to leave.

Sakura feels awful. Tsunade is her shishou. She’s trained under her for years. They’re nearly as close as Naruto and Jiraiya had been. She should have noticed.

Instead, she doesn’t know it’s happening until Tsunade and Shizune stop by the hospital on the way out of the village, headed to parts unknown to gamble away whatever small fortune they’ve amassed playing it safe in Konoha.

“You’re _leaving?”_ She screeches—unintentionally—in the hospital’s reception area.

“That brat Kakashi finally took the hat and foisted all his work on Naruto. There’s nothing left for me to do but drink and gamble my way through the Union.”

Next to her, Shizune sighs dispiritedly.

“But the hospital—”

“Is in good hands,” she says. Tsunade means her. Her hands. She fights down a blush at the compliment.

If Shizune is already this resigned, then Sakura has no hope of swaying Tsunade any other direction. It would take a miracle.

“I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll stop by now and again.” Tsunade grins sharply. “After I win the jackpot. Strip those back-alley jokers for all they’re worth!”

Sakura bites her lips over a smile. “Give ‘em hell, shishou.”

“I always do.”

“Actually,” Shizune mutters as they walk out the hospital, “You never do. You get played a sucker every time.” Tonton snorts in agreement.

After that, there’s nothing left to do but get back to work. The wounded aren’t going to heal themselves, though she certainly wishes they would.

Sakura mistakenly thinks that’s the end of it. Like a fool.

But Kakashi is the Hokage, which _nothing good_ can come from, and two seconds after her shift ends, there’s a messenger hawk with an official scroll addressed to her. The hawk perches on her outstretched arm as she takes the scroll, then flies away. Not a reply-to message, then.

She unrolls it, wondering what catastrophic thing could’ve happened in the few hours since Tsunade left, only to completely fail to comprehend the contents on the scroll.

Sakura walks back inside the hospital on autopilot, frowning at the scroll with blank eyes and handing it to the first receptionist that stumbles by.

“Read this aloud, please,” she says absently. She needs to make sure her eyes aren’t broken.

The receptionist—a new hire, Hikari or Hinara or something—stutters briefly before clearing her throat and reading. “By unanimous vote, with the signed approval of Hokage Hatake Kakashi, following the departure and subsequent resignation of Senju Tsunade, the Council of Konohagakure selects Haruno Sakura as Head of Medicine, effective immediately.” The receptionist lowers the scroll and blinks up at Sakura. “Congratulations, ma’am.”

Sakura breaks the reception desk in half.

Then she proceeds to march into the Hokage’s office and break _that_ desk when she throws it across the room at Kakashi.

Then she gratefully accepts the position and breezes out of Kakashi’s office, saying she’s got a hospital to manage and that certain former teachers would do well to remember that she was trained by one of the Legendary Sannin and just because she is a medic-nin does not mean she’s against hospitalization as an educational aid.

“Maa, Tsunade, what terrors have you left me with?” Kakashi says on her way out.

Kakashi is a no-good bastard who decided to blindside her with this _,_ before the dust had even settled from Tsunade’s departure. Kakashi deserves all the terrors he gets.

 

* * *

 

Despite her initial reaction to being appointed department head at _nineteen,_ she takes to politics the same way she took to medical ninjutsu. Post-war Konoha is a very different place from the one it once was, before Pain’s invasion. A lot of senior shinobi were lost in the war and her sudden premature authority is hardly unique. Shikamaru and Ino both assumed their roles as clan leaders in the wake of their fathers’ deaths, and Ino gave up her shifts at the hospital and her medical training altogether in order to focus her efforts on leading the Intelligence Division.

There’s also the added benefit that as department head, she has a seat on the council. From what she understands, Sasuke needs all the allies he can get. They’re still firmly against his mere existence, let alone his seat on the council, so if Sakura can provide one voice of reason among them, she’ll take it. If this is the role Konoha needs her to fill, then who is she to argue?

Naruto is going to feel left out, but Naruto is going to be Hokage in a few years so he can shut his mouth and wait his turn.

It’s the same, but it’s not. Because while she was already running the hospital while Tsunade was playing Hokage and Shizune was babysitting her to make sure she kept out of trouble, she’s never had the power to make sweeping decisions.

It’s the middle of a long shift, when they’ve got fourteen gurneys crammed into hallways with overflow shinobi pouring in from a joint mission over the Southern border, their injuries only worsened by the substandard field aid the Kiri shinobi had applied and the frankly terrifying manner in which Kumo shinobi handled their injuries before they got here, when she realizes this is something she can fix.

Not just immediately, though her hands are flipping through a series of seals that should help stitch this woman’s skin up right over the ten-inch gash she has in her abdomen, but permanently. On a union-wide scale.

It’s just not feasible to have a medic-nin on every team, when teams tend to run on the small side universally as it is, but there’s been a push in Konoha for years to train up most ninjas with the very basics. She’s certainly never seen a Konoha ninja turn up with a tourniquet tied _below a stab wound in the thigh,_ where it does absolutely nothing but cause more problems. Apparently, that’s acceptable field aid in Kumo.

She won’t have it. Not when there are people dying in _her_ hospital—usually hers, when they’re the closest Union hospital to the Southern continent—or out in the field when they can’t be moved, and none of the other ninjas know the first thing about stopping someone from bleeding out.

She has a duty, not just to Konoha but to the entire Union, to save as many people as she can. Kill some, too, but usually only the ones who are trying to kill her. But she can’t just go running off to a war zone slapping bandaids on friendlies. And she can’t do anything here except damage control.

What she can do is march into the other hidden villages and train all their ninjas how to stop their teammates from dying. Or at the very least, break things until they agree. She’s hoping most of them will be sensible enough to take her at her word, considering she’s got a reputation as the terrifying kunoichi who spent most of her life patching up Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke.

They’ll listen to her. She’ll make them listen to her. That’s why Kakashi made her the department head, right? To fix crap like this and beat all the other hidden villages into submission. She can do this.

All that’s left is beating _Kakashi_ into submission.

Good thing she has plenty of practice, then.


	12. Chapter 12

Naruto is _pretty sure_ Sakura is avoiding them on purpose. Because she’s evil, and she thinks she’s gonna convince them that they should be doing it with each other when she’s not there. She probably just wants to watch because she’s secretly a total perv.

But Naruto isn’t gonna lose to that bastard. He’s totally got it together, he can keep it in his pants however long he has to. Just ‘cause he’s a frigid asshole doesn’t mean Naruto can’t beat him at his own game.

Besides, Sakura doesn’t think this is a competition, even though it totally is. She’s a girl, stuff like this doesn’t mean anything to her, anyway. (Probably.)

When Sakura finally leaves, along with a whole bunch of ANBU escorts, she sends Naruto a little wave and a grin with her tongue poking out. Naruto squints and keeps his arms crossed and is totally not gonna lose. It should be even better without Sakura there to distract him, anyway.

The problem is, he’s still gotta live with the jackass. He kinda misses his old apartment, the one he had before the rebuilding started. It was small and crappy and the water shut off randomly sometimes, and the walls were really thin, and everything was kinda run-down after generations of war orphans cycling through there, but at least it was his. And Sasuke never showed his ugly face there.

Considering they’re both ninjas, they do kind of okay at avoiding each other. Naruto starts coming in through the windows a lot more, and he always sneaks into the kitchen when he knows Sasuke is out doing stuff for ANBU or whatever. But then Naruto walks in on Sasuke boredly chopping up vegetables in the kitchen, and Sasuke hardly even acknowledges Naruto’s presence, and Naruto starts to panic because what if he was taking the easy way out by avoiding the asshole this whole time? And now that would mean Sasuke is winning, because maybe Sasuke wasn’t avoiding him, or at least, he’s not trying to now, with the vegetables and the standing in the middle of the kitchen and Naruto is _furious._

He makes a point of striding into the kitchen and going to grab for a cup ramen, just to prove to Sasuke that Naruto can do everything just fine on his own, and he’s totally okay with being around Sasuke without getting, like, needy or whatever.

“Hn,” is Sasuke’s response. Naruto whips around and glares at him. “What’s the matter, afraid of a little home cooking?” Sasuke asks, tossing the carrots into a pot on the stove and starting in on the peppers.

Naruto sticks his chin up and says “No. I’m just—”

“I’m making a whole pot. It’ll go to waste.”

Naruto clenches his teeth and tries to figure out what kind of game Sasuke is playing here, but he comes up empty. But maybe, if he sticks around and plays along, he can figure it out. And then he can win. And Sasuke will have to shut his stupid mouth.

Sasuke shoves a knife at him and tells him to start chopping. Naruto grumbles but complies. He’s a lot slower and messier than Sasuke, and it irks him. But he’s not gonna, like, try super hard to learn to cook well because then Sasuke will _know_ it’s a competition and there’s no way Naruto is gonna win that one.

Naruto spaces out and slices into his thumb, sucking in air through his teeth and letting the knife drop with a clatter. He pulls his finger into his mouth to suck at it, and Sasuke turns around and glances pointedly at the cutting board, which has drops of his blood all over the peppers.

Sasuke huffs in annoyance and swipes the cutting board out from under Naruto.

“Hey! I wasn’t finished!” Naruto cries, shaking his hand and wrapping his thumb in the sleeve of his shirt.

Sasuke snorts and dumps the sliced into the trash, saving the untouched whole ones. “You got your blood all over them, idiot.”

“Only on, like, a little bit!” Naruto argues.

“Are you even a real ninja?” Sasuke drawls, and goes to wash off the cutting board while the pot on the stove simmers and crackles.

“Hey, asshole! Cooking is different from ninja stuff. I’m an _awesome_ ninja!”

“And a piss-poor cook,” Sasuke snaps back. “Get out before you bleed on anything else.”

“Screw you! I can do it. I’m not even bleeding anymore.” Naruto plants his feet firmly and crosses his arms and refuses to leave the kitchen. He’s _not_ bleeding anymore—it was a really shallow cut, and his healing’s been better than ever since Kurama and him are on good terms.

“Whatever,” Sasuke says, still refusing to relinquish the cutting board back into Naruto’s control. He chops up the remaining peppers with ease and dumps them into the pot. “I’m not eating your blood. You’ve probably got diseases.”

Naruto is already _seething,_ but he totally knows this tone of voice. It’s Sasuke’s ‘I’m gonna rile Naruto up and make him say stupid things’ tone, and Naruto is not falling for it this time. “No,” he says, calm but still furious, “I can’t get anything.”

Sasuke slows as he considers this, his back still turned to Naruto as he chops up more vegetables.

Naruto scratches at his nose. “Ah—’cause of Kurama. I can’t get sick or carry anything and get anyone else sick. That’s why I never have to use a—ah,” he stops, embarrassed. He’s ridiculously grateful Sasuke can’t see his flush. Even though Sasuke gets it anyway, ‘cause _duh,_ it’s not like he hasn’t noticed that Naruto is never the one buying condoms.

Sasuke seems to come back to himself, still going about the cooking like Naruto hasn’t just brought up their sex life when they’re locked in a battle to see how long they can both go without needing sex. God damn it, he’s _really_ bad at this.

Sasuke is obviously determined to make the rest of dinner without Naruto’s help, so Naruto huffs a little and hops up onto the counter Sasuke isn’t working at, using it as a seat and facing Sasuke’s back as he cooks.

“Great,” Sasuke cuts in, almost annoyed, which is a little confusing. Is he jealous or something? “Just don’t get Sakura pregnant.”

Naruto chokes on the air for a second, covering it with a not-so-subtle cough, and says “What? I—No! No way, she’s taking that birth control stuff all the kunoichi take.” Which Sasuke should know by now, because Naruto totally remembers them forgetting to be safe, responsible adults at least a couple of times. “Besides, I—ah, I can’t, um, do that either.”

“Can’t get pregnant?” Sasuke drawls sarcastically, “What a blow to your womanhood that must be.”

Naruto blatantly ignores that dig, instead opting for honesty ‘cause—well, ‘cause Sasuke probably has a right to know this stuff. Sakura, too, even though he’s not really sure that Tsunade didn’t already tell her.

“No, I mean I can’t get anyone pregnant. It’s—well,” he ducks his head and scrubs at his hair nervously, kicking his feet in front of him. “It’s ‘cause of Kurama too, but it’s not really his fault. I just—Baa-chan said it was probably ‘cause I let his chakra overwhelm me too many times, before we worked it out. It did a real number on me and—heh, no more swimmers.” He scrunches up his face in distaste at thinking about it. That had been a _really_ awkward conversation with Tsunade. She’d been really nice about it, though, and said they could probably still try a couple lines of treatment but then it got even _more_ awkward ‘cause he was still only sixteen at the time and they both kinda agreed to never, ever speak of it again.

Sasuke is still patently refusing to turn around or do anything other than respond verbally and act like stirring a pot full of vegetables and broth is the most attention-consuming thing in the world. But Naruto is getting pretty good at reading him from just staring at his back, what with all the ignoring-him Sasuke does, and right now he seems kind of...softer. Like he’s being really careful about his movements, and his shoulders aren’t tensed up like they were before.

They hadn’t really brought up the future of their relationship. Naruto’s pretty sure Sasuke would rather light himself on fire than talk about anything emotional like that, and they’re still pretty new and everything is shiny and fun (most of the time, anyway, when Sasuke isn’t being a dumbass). They’re focusing on their careers, right now, and training, and figuring out how they work together. And it’s really, really good, so it’s not like they’re even thinking about, like, when they’re older and they’ve got their jobs all figured out. Naruto wants kids—has always wanted kids—but he’s never really asked Sakura or Sasuke about it. He knows Sasuke is all “revival of my clan, protect the sharingan, pride of the Uchiha” or whatever, but he’s never talked about it in concrete terms. And he thinks Sakura probably wants kids, one day, but he also knows she isn’t gonna wanna have to take time off work to be pregnant. Plus then there’s the fact that there’s three of them, which isn’t really normal, and people are gonna say weird things, and would they all parent the kids equally, and who would watch them when they’re all busy, and—

Naruto shakes himself a little and puts on his best cheerful expression and tone of voice. “It’s okay, though,” he speaks before he gets a chance to worry anymore, “I always kinda wanted to adopt, anyway. ‘Cause I figure, there are always lots of orphans, right? Like we were both orphans, and I always used to think about how great it would be, if everyone didn’t hate me and I could’ve been adopted or something. And you, too, even if you still remembered your parents and it wasn’t the same, but. I kinda always kept hoping I’d find a family.” Naruto laughs and ducks his head, a little nervous at how chatty he’s being. Sasuke probably doesn’t care, but he hasn’t told Naruto to shut up or get out yet, so that’s something. “Kinda stupid, huh?”

“No,” Sasuke says, so quick that Naruto’s not really sure he said anything at all. But Naruto glances up and Sasuke isn’t moving, just kind of standing with his hand on a spoon in the pot and breathing, and Naruto really wishes he could see his face. He’s trying to figure out what Sasuke’s feeling, but then it kinda seems like he broke Sasuke, and things are getting weird and tense and heavy so Naruto hops off the counter, slips up behind Sasuke, shoves his face over Sasuke’s shoulder and takes a big sniff in, face in the steam rising from the pot.

“Mmmm,” he hums, extra loud and entirely pleased. Sasuke makes a noise and then his hand—the one with the wooden spoon, covered in boiling-hot broth—comes up and hits Naruto’s face right down the middle with the spoon.

Naruto stumbles back, crying out and holding his face because god damn it, that _hurt,_ it was hot and Sasuke is an asshole, seriously.

“What the hell!” he shouts.

“Stop getting your spit in the food, you idiot,” Sasuke says darkly, and then he chases Naruto out of the kitchen with the spoon and tells him he’ll fucking call Naruto when his presence is expected. Naruto blows a raspberry in his direction, and grins because now Sasuke is gonna have to clean off the spoon before he can use it again, and Sasuke keeps banging things and making a lot of frustrated noises, and Naruto laughs evilly and tells him to stop being a prissy bitch.

The soup is really, really good.

Sasuke’s still an asshole, though.


	13. Chapter 13

The idiot seems to be under the impression that they’re in some sort of competition. Regarding, from what Sasuke has been able to gather, sex. Or wanting sex. To be perfectly honest, he doesn’t care. He hasn’t been paying enough attention to care. Sakura is away with the medical contingent; something about a unified medical treatment plan for the Union. She’d made a bit of a fuss about Naruto and Sasuke “indulging” while she’s away, which Sasuke had mostly responded to with a raised eyebrow and a bored frown.

Naruto had been more annoying than usual. It’s two weeks into this imaginary competition, and by now he’s bouncing off the walls. Sasuke’s patience is worn thin already, and he’s desperate to receive a summons from the Hokage for a mission. Preferably a long one, with a high enough rank that there will be plenty of bloodshed. But he has an idea Kakashi is scheming something, which is why he refuses to give Sasuke orders and why Naruto suddenly has much more free time on his hands.

It’s a very familiar feeling, wanting to punch that lying bastard right in the mask.

Then again, he’s starting to wonder if he should settle for punching Naruto, instead.

Naruto has been bouncing off the walls for three hours and sixteen minutes, during which time Sasuke had been attempting to _read,_ and it’s getting aggravating enough that his frustration is starting to show.

He snaps the book shut, rises, and snaps loudly “Naruto! Let’s go train.”

Naruto skids into the room, shirtless and with wet toilet paper stuck to his face. (Sasuke is not going to ask.) “Train?” He asks hopefully.

Sasuke strides into his room to change into something light and appropriate for training, and doesn’t wait to see if Naruto is following him before heading out.

Moments later, Naruto bounces up behind him, the toilet paper mostly gone, and properly clothed—not that any amount of orange is ‘proper’. “Training? We’re gonna train together?”

Sasuke hums.

“That’s a great idea!” Naruto says, grinning again. “Where are we gonna train?”

“Training Grounds 3E,” Sasuke answers. It’s a wide-open field just within the city boundaries, one that he and Itachi used to use when they were young, since it was near where the Uchiha compound was. It’s since been leveled and reformed, but it should serve just fine for their purposes.

Naruto is still entirely too energetic when they arrive, bouncing on the balls of his feet and grinning all over the place. “So? So? How’re we gonna do this?”

It’s—a valid question. Sasuke is tempted to suggest a fight, no rules or limitations to their power, but that would escalate rather quickly and probably level the village. He’s also not sure he wouldn’t accidentally kill Naruto. (Considering their history, he wouldn’t be surprised if they both wound up dead because of a training accident.)

Still, keeping it too limited is likely to be a waste of time. There’s not much they can learn from each other if they stick to the basics.

Aside from intending to get Naruto to expend some excess energy, this little plan has another goal. It’s been a while since anyone in Konoha has been reminded of their strength. They know he’s still powerful, of course, which is why the council is exceedingly careful with what they let him do. There are almost always guards placed on him when he is on his own business outside the city limits. He plays along because a move against the guards would arouse suspicion, and it’s not as if he can’t steal away unfollowed if he had any business he needed to keep secret.

But regardless, he figures a small reminder is in order. So that they don’t get complacent. So that the council understands that he is still very much a threat, and Naruto is still a force to be reckoned with, and they would do well to remember that, should they do anything against either of them.

“No weapons,” Sasuke decides, “Ninjutsu and taijutsu only—it would be over before it began if I allowed myself genjutsu.” Naruto gets riled up at that, which was his intention—they’re both well aware that even Sasuke’s best genjutsu would do very little to Naruto when he’s got Kurama on his side. Even if he could potentially control Kurama as well. “Goal is to remain standing. Lose your footing and you lose the round.” That should work well in place of a death match, at least. “And—” he smirks, bringing his left, bandaged arm up and then tucking it firmly behind his back. “One hand behind your back.”

Naruto seems a little taken aback at that, but then a grin spreads across his face and he laughs, bringing his right arm around to tuck behind his own back. “You’re going down, Sasuke,” he says with a wild grin, and before Sasuke can say “start” he’s charging forward with an entirely loose and sloppy punch.

Sasuke dodges easily, debates knocking him down with a strong tap to his back, and then decides to play a little longer. “I never said ‘start’, you moron,” he snaps.

Naruto just turns to smile at him, and he says “I know.” Then he’s attacking again.

They spar playfully for a little, dancing around each other with ease. Neither of them have done little more than some low-key taijutsu. Sasuke hasn’t even had to use his sharingan to keep up with Naruto, though they’re both starting to reach the point that they’re antsy to use some real moves.

He finally activates his sharingan, just so he can land a tap on Naruto’s shoulder. It hits, but hardly does anything to Naruto’s balance. It does, however, get Naruto to grin in a feral way. Naruto dances back and then concentrates with his left hand in front of him. A rasengan spins into life, no shadow clones needed. He’d never quite gotten the hang of creating shadow clones with one-handed seals, though Sasuke does remember him at least succeeding in making one, once.

He clearly doesn’t need them for rasengan anymore, though, and Sasuke just grins back and pops a chidori into his right hand. They dance around each other a moment longer, and then start at the same time—charging ridiculously fast with their attacks aimed outward.

They each miss by centimeters—Naruto’s gives Sasuke a nasty bruise at the curve of his shoulder, and Sasuke scrapes the side of Naruto’s ribs.

When they pull back to size each other up, they’re both grinning. Sasuke can feel the adrenaline pumping, the kind that always comes from a decent fight. Naruto is probably, at least, expending some of his ridiculous amounts of energy.

They resort back to playful spars for a few moments, but they become increasingly desperate again in a matter of minutes. Sasuke would consider another chidori, but his are limited and rasengans are not, so instead he just uses his hand to make a lightning blade and extend his reach a little. Naruto is still dodging, and before he knows it, Naruto is spitting out a low-level wind jutsu that effectively knocks out his lightning blade.

“Tch,” Sasuke says in annoyance. Naruto just grins back, ridiculously. “Cheap,” he says.

Naruto sticks his tongue out. Like he’s _five._

Sasuke’s sharingan only just barely catches the shadow clone rushing him from the side, and Sasuke hadn’t even seen Naruto _make_ the clone, let alone where he’d been hiding it this entire time, since it must’ve been created before they’d limited the use of one arm. He lands a solid kick and the clone poofs out of existence, but in that moment Naruto is right in front of him with a sharp swipe, taking his legs out from under him.

Sasuke uses the split second before he hits the ground to let out a massive _katon,_ flashing fire out in every direction, and blowing with enough counterforce against the ground to spring him back to his feet.

Naruto is standing a good couple meters back, his one arm outstretched, pointing. “That’s cheating!”

Sasuke huffs derisively. “No it’s not.”

“Liar! That was the most cheating thing to ever happen, okay?”

“You don’t make sense,” Sasuke snaps, and then rushes Naruto. He dodges the brunt of the attack, but that’s not Sasuke’s real aim. Instead, he sends a tiny bolt of lighting into one of his legs, and then flies back. Naruto seems overly confident about his latest dodge, but Sasuke’s going to win with this next attack.

He darts forward, empty-handed but _fast,_ and he makes a couple of quick jabs at Naruto in an attempt to get him using his legs to dodge. He keeps pushing it until—there—Naruto’s leg cramps up, from the lightning he’d sent pulsing into it with the last attack, and he’s stumbling and a mere second away from hitting the ground.

Only then there’s a flash of orange light, and when Sasuke lands and looks to see, Naruto—the freaking _idiot—_ has brought out the KCM to—to _use a chakra hand to catch his fall._

“Are you kidding me?” Sasuke shouts, as Naruto bounces up and laughs. _“That_ is cheating.”

“Nuh-uh,” Naruto says.

“What part of ‘one hand behind your back’ did you fail to understand?”

But Naruto just turns around, showing Sasuke his back—and his arm still tucked behind his back, glowing fingers waggling in ‘hello’—before laughing again.

Sasuke lets out what could only be described as a growl and then pulls back and huffs. “Fine,” he grits out, and in seconds Susano’o bursts into being. It’s not the full version, but rather the smaller, compact version he’s been working on perfecting since his return.

It still has a sword, though.

Naruto boggles and points and says “But—but you said no weapons!”

Sasuke doesn’t even dignify that with a response. They pull back, circling, orange versus purple, and then once again they’re launching forward in a burst of speed, Susano’o pitted against Naruto’s pet’s chakra.

They both must recognize the presence of outsider chakra surrounding them at the same time, and they each cut off Susano’o and Kurama’s power at the same time because whoever’s just arrived is about to launch themselves into the middle of it and probably get themselves killed. But their momentum isn’t as easy to stop, and they both crash into each other, heads knocking against one another unguarded before they thump down into the dirt.

Sasuke doesn’t even think about their new visitors, because he’s stumbling to his feet across from Naruto, who’s yelling that he won. “You totally touched the ground first, which means I _won,_ asshole!”

“That’s bullshit!” Sasuke screams back, “You fucking _headbutted_ me like an animal and then _you_ hit the ground first and I fell on top of you!”

“That’s not what happened at all, bastard!” Naruto is shouting back, and then Sasuke is just so mad that he launches himself forward, arm out from behind his back, tackling Naruto into the dirt and wrestling with him, both hands clawing at whatever part he can reach. Naruto fights back, his right arm joining in, pulling at Sasuke’s hair, so Sasuke knees him in the groin, which earns him a sharp bite on his forearm, and Sasuke is going to _strangle him._

They keep tussling, rolling around in the dirt and pulling at each other, barely even using chakra, shouting out random insults whenever Naruto isn’t _biting him_ like a freaking animal.

Before they get any further, there’s a hand gripping around a chunk of hair at the top of his head and pulling him away from Naruto. From the sound of Naruto’s pained whining, the same is happening to him, and when Sasuke bothers to clue in to his surroundings, both him and Naruto are being held by the hair atop their heads, a good meter apart. They’re both breathing a little hard but mostly unharmed. A little dirty and roughed up, maybe.

“Maa, now why are two of my cute students wrestling in the dirt?” Kakashi.

Naruto, ever the loudmouth, shoves his finger at Sasuke and yells “He’s a cheater!”

“For the _last time,_ you idiot, I never cheated!”

“Well it’s not like _I_ cheated!”

“You grew an extra arm, moron!”

“Yeah well _you_ grew a freaking sword, asshole!”

“It’s not training if you don’t use your abilities!”

“Well maybe you shouldn’t make the rules when you’re not gonna follow them, you son of a—”

“My, my,” Kakashi cuts in, still aggravatingly calm. “Sounds quite complicated. As an unbiased spectator, I’m officially calling it a draw. Now, I’m going to release you two, once I remind you that we are currently surrounded by twenty ANBU with the sole intention of protecting their Hokage.”

Sasuke is still breathing and trying to calm his rapid heartbeat, but Kakashi releases his hair and neither him nor Naruto move toward each other. Sasuke rubs a hand over his hair. It probably looks ridiculous.

“I think that’s enough training for today, don’t you?” Kakashi asks without expecting an answer, and his visible eye is squinted in that way that means he’s grinning behind his mask. “While I love to see my students bettering themselves, I think perhaps, in your case, you might want to inform the village before you start training. I was rather enjoying my book until I had about fifteen shinobi in my office, clamoring about alarming spikes in your chakra.”

Naruto is flushing a deep red, and Sasuke just huffs and tosses his head to the side, crossing his arms. No doubt they had been more concerned about his chakra spiking than their golden boy Naruto’s, but then that was his intention—part of it, at least.

“Sorry, Kaka-sensei,” Naruto mumbles.

“Hn.”

“Now, off with you two. I need to send a hawk to my predecessor asking exactly how I’m supposed to fill out the paperwork for this...”

Naruto and Sasuke both turn and march parallel back toward home. Sasuke refuses to so much as turn his head, and Naruto seems to be equally as determined.

They just make it to the edge of the training grounds when Naruto mumbles “cheater” under his breath, and Sasuke is predictably goaded into responding. He still doesn’t know how it is Naruto manages to get under his skin. He’d momentarily forgotten himself in the middle of their fight. Sometimes, Sasuke wonders if he would’ve had his way in the war, had Naruto not been there to force him into irrational anger and emotional outbursts. Who he would be now, if Naruto had died with his parents, long before they’d been forced onto the same team.

There’s no point to trivial thoughts of what could’ve been, though, so he throws out one last parting shot to Naruto before he flash-steps ahead, Naruto’s bickering trailing him as he follows.

 

* * *

 

Kakashi stands back in the open training grounds, letting out a breath. The Third never had to deal with this. Kakashi is eagerly awaiting the day he’s no longer Hokage. Of course, that naturally means it will be Naruto in his place. He’s...not sure that’s going to be any better, honestly.

Kakashi shakes his head and has the ANBU stand down. He’s not going to have time to finish his book today.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> only one chapter left, guys. ;-;
> 
> anyway, I hope you like this one. I certainly do. and it was a long time coming. (heh...sex puns.)
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Naruto can’t believe they’ve still got at least a week before Sakura gets back.

Training was fun, though, even if Sasuke still fucking cheated. Next time Naruto is gonna be the one to make up the rules, and he’s not gonna make it dumb with a bunch of stupid loopholes because he can totally beat Sasuke without cheating.

All this training stuff has only reminded Naruto of their other competition, though. Which he’s definitely not losing, either. He’s just...gonna take the night off, ‘cause he’s a little sore from the training. The good kind of sore, though, which is awesome ‘cause he only just realized that Sasuke’s probably one of the only one who can train him at a higher level. Since they’re so well-matched and everything.

Not that he’s ever gonna say that to Sasuke’s stupid face.

Speaking of his stupid face, though, Naruto hasn’t heard him stomping around the house or anything. He wonders if maybe he finally admitted his defeat and went somewhere else to sulk, but Naruto figures he should probably prod around the house first, to see where he is before he showers and goes to bed.

He finds Sasuke on the lower level, stretched out on the couch and...asleep. Naruto has to blink a couple of times, because he’s not sure he’s even seen Sasuke sleep like this, all sprawled out and safe-looking. He’s still got patches of dirt all over from their training, and his hair looks even stupider than usual. It kinda makes Naruto want to touch it, which, what?

Shit. Shit, okay, Sasuke actually looks kinda cute like this, and Naruto high-tails it out of the room before he loses their competition in a heartbeat. He heads straight into the bathroom and locks the door behind him, trying to calm down. This is definitely only because when Sasuke’s asleep, he’s not being a total prick. That’s the only reason Naruto thought any of that, at all. He’s totally still got this. He’s not gonna lose.

He jerks off in the shower. Twice. And the flush on his cheeks is only from the steam.

He’s still got this.

 

* * *

 

He does not got this. He’s gonna murder Sasuke. Because Sasuke is a fucking asshole of epic proportions, an asshole who katon’d Naruto’s _favorite shirt_ right in front of him just ‘cause he’s too stupid to know how to do laundry and now all his dumb white girly clothes are orange now.

“They were ugly anyway!” Naruto shouts back. “Orochimaru was a fucking _creep_ and you’re a moron for trying to look like that!”

“That wasn’t from Orochimaru, idiot!” Sasuke shouts back, “It had the Uchiha family crest on it! Are you fucking blind?”

“Oh ‘cause ridiculous collars are totally normal!”

“What do you give a shit what I wear?”

“I don’t! So maybe you should stop bitching about the orange and only do your own fucking laundry!”

“Maybe you should stop leaving your dirty orange clothes all over the fucking place, then!”

“Like I’m the only one who—”

“The next time I see something orange I’m lighting it on fire.”

“Like hell you will, asshole!” Naruto shouts and then launches himself at Sasuke. Sasuke sidesteps him and Naruto goes crashing into the wall of the bedroom. He gets up, rubbing at his head, and shoots Sasuke a vicious glare.

Sasuke looks entirely unamused. Because he’s a prick.

“Keep your shit out of my room,” Sasuke says darkly, dropping the last, smoldering remains of Naruto’s favorite T-shirt. It gets ash all over the floor. Sasuke is cleaning that up himself.

“Keep your face out of my sight,” Naruto cuts back.

Sasuke snorts. “We both know you like my face.”

“Like hell!”

“Give an idiot a couple orgasms and he’ll eat from the palm of your hand,” Sasuke sneers. Naruto can feel his eyes turning red.

“Just ‘cause you’re a decent lay doesn’t make you less of a _fucking bastard.”_

“Oh, so now I’m good in bed, too?” Sasuke says flippantly, a self-satisfied smile twisting at his mouth. “If I’ve got all this going for me, it’s a miracle I’m still hanging around with a loser like you.”

Naruto’s punch only lands because he had Kurama’s chakra slip out and push forward at the last minute. When Sasuke regains his composure, he’s got a bloody lip and his sharingan activated. His tongue darts out to lick at the split on his lip.

Naruto curls his hands into tight fists and digs his claws into the palms of his hands.

“Does the council know it’s this easy to make you snap?” Sasuke asks, deceptively quiet, and Naruto _knows_ he’s bringing up the fact that despite everything, there are still some assholes in Konoha who don’t think a jinchuriki is fit to be Hokage. It’s Sasuke’s favorite thing to bring up when he’s angry with Naruto, and it’s stupidly, blindingly effective.

Naruto leaves dents in the floor when he launches himself forward.

He’s not really sure what happens, after that. He’s trying to rip Sasuke apart, he’s totally sure about that part. What he’s not so sure about is Sasuke’s method of fighting back, because one minute there are chakra-loaded fists flying and the next, Naruto has his teeth buried in the meat of Sasuke’s shoulder and blood on his tongue and Sasuke’s hard cock pressing into Naruto’s hip.

Naruto gasps in a breath releases his hold on Sasuke’s shoulder, instead burying his face into the curve of Sasuke’s neck and inhaling as deeply as he can.

Sasuke snorts in amusement, and Naruto doesn’t waste any time in tearing Sasuke out of his shirt so he can press their skin together. He starts rutting his hips against Sasuke’s, breath speeding up steadily.

“Are we fucking now?” Sasuke asks, and he’s infuriatingly calm, like this isn’t doing _anything_ to him. The damn frigid asshole.

“Shut up,” Naruto growls, and nips at the skin behind Sasuke’s ear, right at his hairline. “Kurama’s confused,” he mumbles, as an afterthought. Naruto isn’t Kurama, but there’s this whole problem with fox chakra and animal instinct and to Kurama, fighting and fucking are basically the same thing, because he’s a bloodthirsty little bitch. Naruto’s pretty good at curbing a lot of those instincts, but you spend your entire life with a wild chakra fox living inside your soul and sometimes things get a little fuzzy.

“I am _not_ having sex with your pet,” Sasuke bites out distastefully, but he stretches until his neck is wide and open for the taking.

“No, you’re having sex with _me_ ,” Naruto says. Possessiveness is coursing through him like fire in his veins, and he feels wild, like he’s not sure whether he wants to tear Sasuke into bite-sized pieces and eat him or nip at him all over until he’s writhing beneath him and begging for a good fuck.

“I thought I was supposed to be dying by your hand?” Sasuke drawls. Gods, he’s so annoying.

Naruto slams Sasuke’s hips into the floor and then shoves a rough hand down Sasuke’s pants to press against his erection. “You wanna go back to that instead?” Naruto asks, his voice still scratchy, constantly hovering somewhere next to a growl.

Sasuke’s breath hitches, and Naruto smirks because he totally just won. Sasuke doesn’t say anything, but his hands practically tear Naruto out of his clothes, and then Naruto takes his hand back to do the same with Sasuke’s clothes. There’s suddenly a whole lot of skin everywhere, and Naruto presses his entire body down, shivering with how good it feels.

“If you shoot off early I’m not dragging your useless ass off the flo—”

Naruto cuts him off by biting into his mouth, sucking at the blood on Sasuke’s split lip and scraping at it with his teeth, tearing it back open. Sasuke makes a frankly embarrassing whining noise and his nails dig into Naruto’s shoulder blades.

Sasuke strains up, trying to press their mouths closer, but Naruto shoves his shoulders into the floor and growls against his mouth, “I’m gonna fuck you _through_ the floor.”

Sasuke gasps for breath, and his cock twitches where it’s pressed against Naruto’s hip, clearly on board with this plan. Naruto makes a quick move to grab Sasuke’s wrists and then slam them into the floor next to his head, splintering the wood. “Don’t fucking move,” Naruto says, then he climbs off Sasuke and digs through the drawers for lube.

“Next one over, dumbass,” Sasuke says from the floor, and Naruto doesn’t even bristle at the comment because Sasuke hasn’t moved. He lets himself grin, finds the bottle, and whips it at Sasuke’s chest. Sasuke snatches it out of the air before it can hit him. Naruto drops himself down and pins Sasuke again.

“I thought I told you not to move.”

“Then don’t throw things at me,” Sasuke shoots back, his eyes daring Naruto to fight him about it. Naruto holds his breath a second and then decides to let it go because his cock is straining against his stomach. Naruto shifts his hold so that his hands are on Sasuke’s hips, and Sasuke raises his eyebrows and drawls “If you think you’re getting your claws anywhere near my ass, then you really are too stupid to live.”

Naruto huffs, but he’s got a point. Naruto bites at his lip and then tries to concentrate on getting his claws to retract. Which isn’t exactly easy, ‘cause Sasuke is an asshole who got him all worked up in the first place, and he’s not exactly gonna be able to calm himself down on command.

Sasuke huffs impatiently and says “You’re useless. I’ll do it myself.”

Naruto purrs.

Sort of. It’s an accident. Plus foxes don’t really purr, so it was really more of a...happy, soft growl. He just...really likes that idea.

Sasuke narrows his eyes—back to the plain black now—and says “Don’t think I won’t cut this short if you do anything moronic.”

Naruto just laughs and dips down to nose at Sasuke’s neck again, breathing in and licking at the salty skin there. “Hurry up,” he says, trying not to nuzzle at him too much. His heart is still pounding in his chest and there’s definitely still a part of his brain telling him to tear Sasuke into confetti, but he feels like that most of the time, so he’s good at ignoring it.

Naruto rubs himself discreetly against Sasuke’s thigh, or maybe not so discreetly because Sasuke shoves him to the side before he reaches down to finger himself open. Naruto fights back a whine and compromises by sliding down and swallowing Sasuke’s cock.

Sasuke gulps in a shocked breath and hisses “Fuck.”

Naruto grins around the head of his cock and then starts sucking him down, bobbing his head up and down and swirling his tongue and trying to drive Sasuke close enough to the edge that he scrambles to open himself up faster.

“Shit,” Sasuke says above him, panting, and Naruto pulls off just enough to see Sasuke shove three slick fingers into himself with a slight hiss. Naruto gives Sasuke’s cock a playful lick and it jumps, and then Sasuke is pulling his hand away and using it to drag Naruto back up by his hair until their faces are inches from each other. “Fuck me,” Sasuke says with his own growl.

Naruto doesn’t need to be told twice. He slicks himself up, digs his clawed fingertips into Sasuke’s thigh as he hitches it up, and then Naruto shoves in and presses Sasuke into the floor. They both gasp for breath, and Naruto keeps his hips perfectly still while he tries to stop his head from spinning.

But then Sasuke yanks on his hair and says “Get with the program, dead-last.” He shifts his hips for good measure, and Naruto slides in further.

Naruto breathes out and then braces himself with his hands on Sasuke’s thigh and curved over his shoulder. He shoves forward and pulls back, setting a quick pace. Sasuke slides against the floor as Naruto pushes into him again and again, nothing but heat and slick and need pulsing through him. Sasuke still has one hand buried in Naruto’s hair and he’s ripping at his roots, pulling against the rhythm and then dragging Naruto’s head down and up until he can bite into Naruto’s lower lip.

He breaks the skin and the metallic taste of blood is all he can taste when they kiss. A growl shakes his chest and barely makes it out of his throat. He uses his hand to shift the angle, just a little, not giving an inch on the unrelenting pace. Sasuke swears and his free hand grips around his own cock for a second before Naruto knocks it away. “No,” he says, low and high on the control of it, the power he holds over Sasuke, the way he could slice into him if he wanted, paint the floor with his blood and Sasuke would probably still be begging for more.

He rides out the head rush at that idea, his mind swimming with heat and lust, and then he sinks his teeth into Sasuke’s shoulder, keeps pressing until he breaks the skin and Sasuke groans like the sound was ripped from him. Sasuke spills between them, striping their stomachs, and Naruto feels a pleased tingle shoot from his brain to his cock, and then he’s shoving himself forward and coming in a burst of white-hot heat.

Naruto has to release his teeth from Sasuke’s shoulder so he can breathe, and he barely registers Sasuke shoving him out and off, he just collapses on the floor, half-thrown over Sasuke, panting and feeling the sweat start to cool all over his bare skin.

It’s at least a good ten minutes later when Naruto says “You started this fight which means you totally lost.”

Sasuke bites back, “Go to hell,” and leaves Naruto to adhere to the floor.

 

* * *

 

When Sakura returns, the house needs repairs, her boys are covered with scratches, bruises, and bite marks, and they’re both entirely incapable of looking her in the eye. She laughs so hard she cries.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's a little late. But it's the last chapter. ;-;
> 
> To everyone who's been commenting, THANK YOU. I'm sure this fic would've been fine without you guys, but I know it was so, so much better because you gave me ideas and helped me realize things I was missing and basically created a whole extra chapter. You guys made this fic what it is, so thank you. You're rockstars.
> 
> To everyone who's been silently reading, THANK YOU. For putting up with my I-swear-I-have-a-schedule-here-somewhere posting, and my rambling in the notes like this, and so much of my silly author fuckery. I rarely read in-progress fics because authors do this shit. You are a braver soul than I.
> 
> To anyone harmed in the making of this roller coaster, I'm sorry. C'est la vie.
> 
> Happy Coming Out Day, and remember, this fic is finished but the series is not. :)
> 
> Enjoy~!
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Sakura wakes up feeling like the world is in balance for the first time in a long time.

Plus, she doesn’t have to feel guilty about shoving Naruto off of her when he starts nuzzling at her chest. She’s sleepy and she’s not entirely sure she’s up for morning sex, and she knows Naruto won’t push it if she doesn’t want to, but now she just pushes him toward Sasuke. What’s wonderful about this arrangement is that Naruto and Sasuke refuse to listen to each other anyway, so even when Sasuke starts grumbling that he wants to keep sleeping, Naruto just keeps pestering him and carrying on one-sided.

Sakura dozes lazily, her eyes closed and the sun warm on her bare skin while the boys tussle next to her. She can tell when Naruto finally gets fed up with Sasuke trying to shove him off because there’s a wet, sucking sound and then a throaty gasp from Sasuke. Naruto really seems to like sucking cock. She should probably ask him about that, sometime. It seems like it’d be an interesting topic to explore.

Actually, she wonders about both of them and how they define themselves. Naruto seems rather like an equal opportunist, but Sasuke is a bit harder to read. Sakura is fairly sure she herself is straight, but it’s not as if she hasn’t entertained ideas of women. Two boys is just more than enough to handle as it is. Especially when those two boys are gone on each other and don’t entirely realize that they are.

Naruto is sucking in tiny gasps of breath and the bed is rocking gently. She thinks Sasuke has just discovered his own appreciation for sucking cock. Considering Sakura’s not the biggest fan of it, this works out rather well in her favor. She can just get the boys to do it for each other. Wonderful. This is wonderful.

Naruto whimpers when he comes, and eventually the other side of the bed quiets down and stops moving, and Sakura figures she should probably get up, so she says “Good job,” to both of them, patting the first body her hand connects with, and then slips out of bed and goes to make a strong, caffeinated tea, not even bothering to hide her self-satisfied smile.

Sasuke slips into the kitchen after half an hour, his limbs loose and his eyes half-lidded. She doesn’t say good morning, because Sasuke doesn’t need pleasantries, and probably used up his quota for the day with Naruto in bed earlier.

Instead she quietly sips at her tea and watches Sasuke make coffee, butter toast, and fry eggs with his eyes closed. He won’t accidentally light anything on fire because he’s a ninja, but he’s also a bit of a dumbass, so she keeps a careful eye on his sleeve when he’s near the stove.

Sasuke’s still frying the eggs when Naruto stumbles downstairs and walks in, yawning and stretching. It’s one of those rare mornings where none of them have anywhere to be in a hurry. With her new responsibilities at the hospital, Sasuke taking more missions, and Naruto at the beck and call of a depraved madman with boyband hair, they rarely get to sleep in, and almost never on the same day.

Naruto looks like he’s still blinking the afterglow away, sleepy but giddy. He mumbles out a good morning, kisses the top of her head, and gropes Sasuke’s ass on his way over to the cabinets where he keeps his ramen. Sasuke barely reacts, so Sakura’s fairly sure he’s still stuck in the afterglow as well. She hides her grin behind her cup of tea.

Naruto starts whining after a few minutes, pitiful little mumbles about ramen. He ate five cups for dinner last night. She has no sympathy.

Suddenly there’s a plate of eggs and toast sliding in front of her. She blinks up at Sasuke as he’s putting together his own plate, smiling softly. Naruto is still grumbling at the cabinets, quietly but pointedly, and Sasuke doesn’t pause before loading up a third plate with more eggs and toast than either of them and shoving it in Naruto’s face. “Here. Eat. Ramen isn’t real food anyway.”

“Is too,” Naruto mutters quietly, but takes the plate.

They sit.

They eat.

It’s...peaceful. She’s _content—_ with her life, with her place in the world, with where she is at this exact moment in time _._ She’s perfectly content. For one glorious, shining minute, she reaches nirvana.

And then Naruto kicks Sasuke under the table and asks “Bacon?” and Sasuke snaps back with “Make it yourself! You have hands!” which Naruto takes as a Valley of the End reference, and the fragile, hazy, peaceful morning this could have been is shattered in the ensuing tiff. As are four plates and a floorboard.

But in the scope of a lifetime spent with these two morons, Sakura knows she was lucky to get that minute.

And she’ll be luckier still to get all the minutes after.

 

* * *

 

It’s only been a year since they started dating. A few months since Sasuke tried to leave. A couple weeks since Naruto asked them, in a whisper in the dark, “What if I’m not good enough to be Hokage?”

It’s too soon.

They’re still figuring this out. They’re still figuring _everything_ out—their lives, their careers, who the hell they’re supposed to be after the war. And despite what Naruto thinks, “I’m _supposed_ to be the Hokage!” is not a complete answer to that question. Not that he won’t be Hokage, because he will once Kakashi gets bored with pulling Naruto around by the strings. But no one person is just one thing, and besides which who the hell is Sasuke supposed to be? Who’s Sakura supposed to be?

And it’s her fault. Sakura had gotten distracted. It’s like her brain had just turned off between the hospital and finding her footing in the council meetings and the Unified Medic-Nin Initiative and looking after her boys so they don’t accidentally kill each other. It should’ve been fine. It should have, but it wasn’t, and now she’s here and _it’s too damn soon._

She could fix it. Just a twist of chakra in the right place and she could fix it, simple as that, but—

She loves them. She loves them both, has spent the past year learning how to love them when they’re all actually on the same page with the love thing. And they’re working. They work together, as three, even though no one thought they would. Everyone still expects them to fall apart any moment now. Most of the council is still counting the days down until Sasuke snaps and tries to murder the entire village.

But that won’t happen. They’re going to make it. She can feel it, settling deep inside her gut like a swirling ball of chakra. After everything they fought through, all the odds stacked against them, they made it to the other side and now there’s nothing that’s going to stop them. Not if any one of them has anything to say about it.

But this— This is more than just them. So much more.

None of them are ready for this. They will be in a few years, maybe, when they’re settled, when Sasuke can walk in the door without his sharingan scanning for ambush, when Naruto can sleep through the night without startling awake and checking to make sure they’re both still breathing, when Sakura stops looking for someone who outranks her every time an intern at the hospital asks her a question.

It’s just too soon.

Isn’t it?

They fought on the front lines of a war when they were teenagers. Sasuke is never going to stop expecting an ambush. Naruto is never going to stop worrying they’re dead. Sakura is never going to know the correct line of treatment every time with certainty. Life doesn’t work like that.

And maybe it’s only been a year, but it’s also been eight years. She has loved these stupid, _stupid_ boys for eight years, and she’s prepared to love them for another eight—another eighty—without a second thought.

There will never be a perfect time. Maybe there will be a _better_ time, a few years down the line. Or maybe there will be another war. Another Orochimaru. Another Akatsuki.

The world isn’t going to stop turning for a couple years just so they can have some peace and quiet to get their shit together. She’s living in the same house as Naruto and Sasuke—her life is never going to be quiet, or easy, or settled. She wouldn’t want it to be. Naruto goes crazy after just an hour without anything to do. Give them quiet and they’d just create their own chaos.

Maybe it is too soon. Maybe she should wait. But she’s not going to, because she’s never been one to give up on what she wants. It got her Sasuke, it got her Naruto, it got her the power to heal people with her bare hands. And now it’s gotten her here, and she _wants_ this, so like hell she’s going to give up just because it’s not the perfect time.

“Boys,” she says, watching them seated across from her—Sasuke still and indifferent, Naruto shifting with anticipation, both of them hers—and she can’t help but smile, because even after eight years of seeing more shit than anyone should ever have to see, she knows she can still shock them. “I’m pregnant.”

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
